DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop VIII
February 27-March 2, 2000  Santa Fe, NM

78. Progress Report on EMP Project

Evgeni Selkov, Nadezhda Avseenko, Valentina Dronova, Galina Dyachenko, Aleksandr Elefterov, Milyausha Galimova, Nadezhda Fedotcheva, Maria Fomkina, Tatiana Kharybina, Irina Krestova, Aleksandr Kuzmin, Elena Mudrik, Nikolay Mudrik, Valentina Nenasheva, Valeri Nenashev, Evgeni Nikolaev, Aleksandr Osipov, Lyudmila Pronevich, Anna Rykunova, Aleksey Selkov, Evgeni Selkov, Jr., Vladimir Semerikov, Tatiana Sirota, Anatoly Sorokin, Oleg Stupar', Vadim Ternovsky, and Olga Vasilenko

EMP Project Inc, Russian Subsidiary, Institutskaya 4, suite 121, 142292 Pushchino, Moscow Region, Russia 142292 Pushchino, Moscow Region, Russia

In the first quarter of this FY, the main focus of the EMP Project was on the following:

A high database annotation rate of about 800 records; there were 2,423 and 6,850 records encoded during the last three and twelve months, respectively (See Tab. 1), totaling 29,991 records by the end of 1999.

Table 1. EMP Updating Rate For the Last Twelve Months

Updating the EMP content with new records for novel enzymes classified by the Supplements 5 and 6 to the Enzyme Nomenclature.

Developing a new EMP format to simplify the encoding and retrieving the information with a special effort of extending the format toward signal transduction pathways and phenotype.

Organizing and training groups of annotators in some specific information domains, e.g. Enzyme Kinetics, Signal Transduction, Metabolic Pathways, Phenotype, etc.

Organizing a Software Development Team of 8 professional developers. Designing a new web site interface for EMP to be installed with next two months.

Opening a new office in Pushchino of 120 m2 with 19 working stations; improving hardware, network connection, and technical for annotators working at home.

In the coming months, we plan to develop a new EMP format documentation for annotators and users. This will slow down the annotation rate. Still, it will remain to be at the planned level of not less than 500 records a month.

With a very active support of GlaxoWellcome, we began a dialogue with the Swiss-Prot staff to unify the nomenclature and software development and to coordinate the information processing and encoding for Swiss-Prot and EMP. A trilateral workshop to discuss this cooperation between Swiss-Prot, EMP Project, and GlaxoWellcome is to be held in Geneva on March 27-29.