June 1, 2005 (Vol. 25, No. 11)
URL:
http://www.pandora.cs.huji.ac.il
Rating:
Strong Points: Uniqueness of idea
Weak Points: Mostly for data mining nerds
Summary:
Open PANDORA’s box and you’ll find a lot of information. A site with a clever acronym, the second word defining the acronym (Annotation) is the key to understanding this one. In PANDORA, annotations take on a life of their own, serving as a binary property assigned to a protein. With the resources of InterPro, Gene Ontology, ENZYME, and SCOP, among others, at its disposal, PANDORA is able to deliver a tremendous amount of information to the user. PANDORA’s approach to analysis is a little hard to describe and rooted in the science of data mining. By examining descriptions and keywords for patterns for individual proteins in each database, PANDORA creates “integrative annotation analysis sets” of protein information. Finally, all of this information is assembled into illustrative diagrams that have to be seen to be undrstood. A very unusual idea, but does it tell anything meaningful?
