Integrating biological data--the Distributed Annotation System
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Updated: Jul 3, 2026
Annotation of Plant Gene Function via Combined Genomics, Metabolomics and Informatics
Published on: June 17, 2012
Andrew M Jenkinson1, Mario Albrecht, Ewan Birney
1European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK. andy.jenkinson@ebi.ac.uk
Background:
The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a widely adopted protocol for dynamically integrating a wide range of biological data from geographically diverse sources. DAS continues to expand its applicability and evolve in response to new challenges facing integrative bioinformatics.
Results:
Here we describe the various infrastructure components of DAS and present a new extended version of the DAS specification. Version 1.53E incorporates several recent developments, including its extension to serve new data types and an ontology for protein features.
Conclusion:
Our extensions to the DAS protocol have facilitated the integration of new data types, and our improvements to the existing DAS infrastructure have addressed recent challenges. The steadily increasing numbers of available data sources demonstrates further adoption of the DAS protocol.
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