The Database of Protein Disorder (DisProt, URL: https://disprot.org) provides manually curated annotations of intrinsically disordered proteins from the literature. Here we report recent developments with DisProt (version 8), including the doubling of protein entries, a new disorder ontology, improvements of the annotation format and a completely new website. The website includes a redesigned graphical interface, a better search engine, a clearer API for programmatic access and a new annotation interface that integrates text mining technologies. The new entry format provides a greater flexibility, simplifies maintenance and allows the capture of more information from the literature. The new disorder ontology has been formalized and made interoperable by adopting the OWL format, as well as its structure and term definitions have been improved. The new annotation interface has made the curation process faster and more effective. We recently showed that new DisProt annotations can be effectively used to train and validate disorder predictors. We believe the growth of DisProt will accelerate, contributing to the improvement of function and disorder predictors and therefore to illuminate the ‘dark’ proteome.

With applications in biology, the world-wide web, and several other areas, mining of graph-structured objects has received significant interest recently. One of the major research directions in this field is concerned with predictive data mining in graph databases where each instance is represented by a graph. Some of the proposed approaches for this task rely on the excellent classification performance of support vector machines. To control the computational cost of these approaches, the underlying kernel functions are based on frequent patterns. In contrast to these approaches, we propose a kernel function based on a natural set of cyclic and tree patterns independent of their frequency, and discuss its computational aspects. To practically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we use the popular NCI-HIV molecule dataset. Our experimental results show that cyclic pattern kernels can be computed quickly and offer predictive performance superior to recent graph kernels based on frequent patterns. Keywordsgraph mining, kernel methods, computational chemistry * This work was supported in part by the DFG project (WR 40/2-1) Hybride Methoden und Systemarchitekturen für heterogene Informationsräume.

Membraneless organelles (MOs) are dynamic liquid condensates that host a variety of specific cellular processes, such as ribosome biogenesis or RNA degradation. MOs form through liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS), a process that relies on multivalent weak interactions of the constituent proteins and other macromolecules. Since the first discoveries of certain proteins being able to drive LLPS, it emerged as a general mechanism for the effective organization of cellular space that is exploited in all kingdoms of life. While numerous experimental studies report novel cases, the computational identification of LLPS drivers is lagging behind, and many open questions remain about the sequence determinants, composition, regulation and biological relevance of the resulting condensates. Our limited ability to overcome these issues is largely due to the lack of a dedicated LLPS database. Therefore, here we introduce PhaSePro (https://phasepro.elte.hu), an openly accessible, comprehensive, manually curated database of experimentally validated LLPS driver proteins/protein regions. It not only provides a wealth of information on such systems, but improves the standardization of data by introducing novel LLPS-specific controlled vocabularies. PhaSePro can be accessed through an appealing, user-friendly interface and thus has definite potential to become the central resource in this dynamically developing field.