Once the part-time, poorly paid province of postdocs and graduate students, biocuration has become a full-time, salaried career, driven by the explosive growth of biological data in recent years. More genomes are being sequenced, cDNA and EST projects are proliferating, the HapMap Project is going strong - and that's just nucleotide sequencing. Then there's proteomics or 3-D structures (see "Seeing is Believing" pg. 46), notes Rolf Apweiler, who heads the sequence database group in Hinxton, UK, at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), a division of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
"We're getting to the point where it's possible to sequence a genome in a day," adds Maria Costanzo, a biocurator working on Stanford University's Saccharomyces and Candida genome databases. "But the raw sequence information is pretty much worthless unless it's interpreted and organized. The open-reading frames and other sequence features have to be identified; comparisons need to be made with ...
