We used automatic text-mining of PubMed abstracts of papers related to obesity, with the aim of revealing that the information used in abstracts reflects the current understanding and key concepts of this widely explored problem. We compared expert data from DisGeNET to the results of an automated MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) search, which was performed by the ScanBious web tool. The analysis provided an overview of the obesity field, highlighting major trends such as physiological conditions, age, and diet, as well as key well-studied genes, such as adiponectin and its receptor. By intersecting the DisGeNET knowledge with the ScanBious results, we deciphered four clusters of obesity-related genes. An initial set of 100+ thousand abstracts and 622 genes was reduced to 19 genes, distributed among just a few groups: heredity, inflammation, intercellular signaling, and cancer. Rapid profiling of articles could drive personalized medicine: if the disease signs of a particular person were superimposed on a general network, then it would be possible to understand which are non-specific (observed in cohorts and, therefore, most likely have known treatment solutions) and which are less investigated, and probably represent a personalized case.

The paper describes a scheme for the comparative analysis of the sets of Pubmed publications. The proposed analysis is based on the comparison of the frequencies of occurrence of keywords—MeSH terms. The purpose of the analysis is to identify MeSH terms that characterize research areas specific to each group of articles, as well as to identify trends—topics on which the number of published works has changed significantly in recent years. The proposed approach was tested by comparing a set of medical publications and a group of articles in the field of personalized medicine. We analyzed about 700 thousand abstracts published in the period 2009–2021 and indexed them with MeSH terms. Topics with increasing research interest have been identified both in the field of medicine in general and specific to personalized medicine. Retrospective analysis of the keywords frequency of occurrence changes has shown the shift of the scientific priorities in this area over the past 10 years. The revealed patterns can be used to predict the relevance and significance of the scientific work direction in the horizon of 3–5 years. The proposed analysis can be scaled in the future for a larger number of groups of publications, as well as adjusted by introducing filters at the stage of sampling (scientific centers, journals, availability of full texts, etc.) or selecting a list of keywords (frequency threshold, use of qualifiers, category of generalizations).

Foodborne bacteria interconnect food and human health. Despite significant progress in food safety regulation, bacterial contamination is still a serious public health concern and the reason for significant commercial losses. The screening of the microbiome in meals is one of the main aspects of food production safety influencing the health of the end-consumers. Our research provides an overview of proteomics findings in the field of food safety made over the last decade. It was believed that proteomics offered an accurate snapshot of the complex networks of the major biological machines called proteins. The proteomic methods for the detection of pathogens were armed with bioinformatics algorithms, allowing us to map the data onto the genome and transcriptome. The mechanisms of the interaction between bacteria and their environment were elucidated with unprecedented sensitivity, specificity, and depth. Using our web-based tool ScanBious for automated publication analysis, we analyzed over 48 000 scientific articles on antibiotic and disinfectant resistance and highlighted the benefits of proteomics for the food safety field. The most promising approach to studying safety in food production is the combination of classical genomic and metagenomic approaches and the advantages provided by proteomic methods with the use of panoramic and targeted mass spectrometry.

Within the Human Proteome Project initiative framework for creating functional annotations of uPE1 proteins, the neXt-CP50 Challenge was launched in 2018. In analogy with the missing-protein challenge, each command deciphers the functional features of the proteins in the chromosome-centric mode. However, the neXt-CP50 Challenge is more complicated than the missing-protein challenge: the approaches and methods for solving the problem are clear, but neither the concept of protein function nor specific experimental and/or bioinformatics protocols have been standardized to address it. We proposed using a retrospective analysis of the key HPP repository, the neXtProt database, to identify the most frequently used experimental and bioinformatic methods for analyzing protein functions, and the dynamics of accumulation of functional annotations. It has been shown that the dynamics of the increase in the number of proteins with known functions are greater than the progress made in the experimental confirmation of the existence of questionable proteins in the framework of the missing-protein challenge. At the same time, the functional annotation is based on the guilty-by-association postulate, according to which, based on large-scale experiments on API-MS and Y2H, proteins with unknown functions are most likely mapped through “handshakes” to biochemical processes.