Shaping biological knowledge: applications in proteomics

The central dogma of molecular biology has provided a meaningful principle for data integration in the field of genomics. In this context, integration reflects the known transitions from a chromosome to a protein sequence: transcription, intron splicing, exon assembly and translation. There is no such clear principle for integrating proteomics data, since the laws governing protein folding and interactivity are not quite understood. In our effort to bring together independent pieces of information relative to proteins in a biologically meaningful way, we assess the bias of bioinformatics resources and consequent approximations in the framework of small-scale studies. We analyse proteomics data while following both a data-driven (focus on proteins smaller than 10 kDa) and a hypothesis-driven (focus on whole bacterial proteomes) approach. These applications are potentially the source of specialized complements to classical biological ontologies.