MOTIVATION: A key challenge in phosphoproteomic studies is to distinguish functionally relevant phosphorylation sites from potentially 'silent' phosphorylation. Considering that relevant phosphorylation sites are expected to be better conserved during evolution than overall Serine, Threonine and Tyrosine (S/ T/ Y) residues, we asked whether this can be directly demonstrated through statistic analysis, using a large experimental dataset. RESULTS: Analyzing phosphoproteomic data derived from the human mitotic spindle apparatus, we found that 95.2% of 1744 phosphorylation sites are conserved in at least one of six other vertebrate species. Using a new score, termed conservation Z-score (CZ-score), we demonstrate that phosphorylation sites are significantly better conserved than other S/T/Y sites, a conclusion validated from several kinase consensus motifs. Most importantly, phosphorylation sites with experimentally verified biological functions were significantly better conserved than other phosphorylation sites, indicating that analysis utilizing evolutionary conservation may constitute a powerful basis for the development of improved phosphorylation site predictors. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: Recently, several information extraction systems have been developed to retrieve relevant information out of biomedical text. However, these methods represent individual efforts. In this paper, we show that by combining different algorithms and their outcome, the results improve significantly. For this reason, CONAN has been created, a system which combines different programs and their outcome. Its methods include tagging of gene/protein names, finding interaction and mutation data, tagging of biological concepts and linking to MeSH and Gene Ontology terms. RESULTS: In this paper, we will present data that show that combining different text-mining algorithms significantly improves the results. Not only is CONAN a full-scale approach that will ultimately cover all of PubMed/MEDLINE, we also show that this universality has no effect on quality: our system performs as well as or better than existing systems. AVAILABILITY: The LDD corpus presented is available by request to the author. The system will be available shortly. For information and updates on CONAN please visit http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/rainer/conan.html.