ESG: extended similarity group method for automated protein function prediction

Importance of accurate automatic protein function prediction is ever increasing in the face of a large number of newly sequenced genomes and proteomics data that are awaiting biological interpretation. Conventional methods have focused on high sequence similarity-based annotation transfer which relies on the concept of homology. However, many cases have been reported that simple transfer of function from top hits of a homology search causes erroneous annotation. New methods are required to handle the sequence similarity in a more robust way to combine together signals from strongly and weakly similar proteins for effectively predicting function for unknown proteins with high reliability.