The breakthrough series: non-globular proteins
Starting this month, COST is highlighting COST Actions, which have had a significant scientific and societal breakthrough.
In the summer of 2021, COST published a Horizon 2020, Final Impact Assessment, portraying the scientific and societal impact of COST. The report includes multiple examples of breakthroughs that contribute to the development of research in Europe and beyond. After an in-depth monitoring and analysis, four Actions were selected to showcase those advancements.
The first scientific breakthrough identified is from COST Action “Non-globular proteins – from sequence to structure, function and application in molecular physiopathology (NGP-NET))” (BM1405), which ran from 2015 to 2019. This network brought together researchers from all over Europe, as well as from Argentina and Japan, on the topic of non-globular protein that play a salient role in a range of diseases. The Action led by Professor Silvio Tosatto from the University of Padua, reanimated the DisProt database on intrinsically disordered proteins through a “community curation” method, in which over 40 researchers from the network contributed. As a result, the database became part of ELIXIR, the European distributed infrastructure for biological data. Another successful achievement of this Action is the spin-off publication on Pfam protein families, which has, at present (December 2021), already been cited over 2000 times.
The factsheet below illustrates the main achievements of this Action:
