The Database of Protein Disorder (DisProt, URL: https://disprot.org) provides manually
curated annotations of intrinsically disordered proteins from the literature. Here
we report recent developments with DisProt (version 8), including the doubling of
protein entries, a new disorder ontology, improvements of the annotation format and
a completely new website. The website includes a redesigned graphical interface, a
better search engine, a clearer API for programmatic access and a new annotation interface
that integrates text mining technologies. The new entry format provides a greater
flexibility, simplifies maintenance and allows the capture of more information from
the literature. The new disorder ontology has been formalized and made interoperable
by adopting the OWL format, as well as its structure and term definitions have been
improved. The new annotation interface has made the curation process faster and more
effective. We recently showed that new DisProt annotations can be effectively used
to train and validate disorder predictors. We believe the growth of DisProt will accelerate,
contributing to the improvement of function and disorder predictors and therefore
to illuminate the 'dark' proteome.
