Antibody Central is a dictionary-based antibody search tool integrating three data domains in a single web resource: UniProtKB, research literature and antibody product catalogs. The site provides links for finding antibodies in the research articles, as well as in the product catalogs of the major antibody vendors.   Data structure implements a proprietary Antibody Name Dictionary model - a collection of protein names, symbols and synonyms recognized as antibody names and verified through the full-text search of scientific publications in HighWire Press. Antibodies are generally referenced by the name of a target protein. An automatic protein name identification in texts is an extremely complex computational problem. Fortunately, finding protein names in the context of antibody applications is relatively simple and produces much more reliable results, because there are only few semantically specific constructs generally used for referencing antibodies in the text. For example, antibody against MAPK protein may appear as "anti-MAPK", "antibody against MAPK", "MAPK antibody" and perhaps few other variants. The process of indexing of the antibody products by Antibody Central database results in mapping them to UniProtKB records. This makes possible an automatic extraction and integration of information form research articles and other text sources. |