How does ERGO™ identify proteins missing from various biochemical pathways?
ERGO™’s strength is its ability to identify missing proteins involved in biochemical pathways. Since ERGO™ integrates both genomic and pathway data from over 600 different organisms investigators see patterns of proteins ‘sticking together’ that function in the same pathway. ERGO™’s proprietary tools visualize these patterns not only locally within a 20 kb region but also across the entire genome to enable investigators to see ‘extra proteins’. Many times these ‘extra proteins’ are of unknown function are even misannotated. Further analysis reveals that they have characteristics you would expect to see in the missing enzymes and/or proteins of a pathway thereby allowing the investigator to hypothesize on the function of these proteins. It is significant to note that the number of patterns increases significantly with the introduction of each new genome into the database.
