New features in FuncNet Web Interface

This week we’ve added various new features to the interactive web interface.

Perhaps most importantly, we now accept submissions of proteins using any identifiers understood by the EBI’S Protein Identifier Cross-Reference service (PICR). FuncNet uses PICR to automatically convert them into their corresponding UniProt primary accessions.

For best coverage and least ambiguity, we still recommend that you use UniProt identifiers of some kind, either accessions or IDs (e.g. Q5SRD3, AGAP8_HUMAN).

We’ve added informational mouseover tooltips to many of the elements of the user interface, e.g. protein accessions and service names, and provided links to further information.

Also, the results page has undergone a major overhaul.

Firstly, large result sets are now viewed one page at a time, where a page contains ten rows of results.

Secondly, you now have the option of viewing either:

1. The overall functional rankings of your query proteins against the reference set as a whole — the default, equivalent of the RetrieveSetwiseScores operation in the web services
2. The individual pairwise associations between query proteins and reference proteins — the equivalent of the RetrieveCompleteScores operation

Both result views are supported in the XML and CSV download links too.

These new features should be considered ’slightly experimental’, and if you have any problems with them, or suggestions for making them better, please let us know.