The true story behind the annotation of a pathway

Abstract

On 2010 we worked on the annotation of the N-Glycosylation pathway in the Reactome database. During this process, we found some unclear points and errors in other databases, and we reported and helped fix them. After we finished, we realized that the work of reporting errors to a database is basically not acknowledged by the scientific community: this is unfortunate because if only this process would be a bit more recognized and transparent, we could have better data in the databases and a more active community. Moreover, the fact that many databases tend to keep error reporting private creates great issues to the reproducibility of a work.Another way to look at this talk is: if you dedicate 6 months of your PhD thesis to annotate carefully a set of genes, in this case a pathway I have been studying, how many errors do you expect to find in other databases, or what should you be careful at?