Genomic resources are already providing enormous insights in human health and the life sciences in general. Recent advances, especially AlphaFold, now enable the improved transformation of genomes into the proteome. This unlocks existing protein-based tools for use in the functional annotation of genomic resources, which will have an enormous impact on our understanding of disease and life processes. As proteins are adaptable and complex molecules, further annotation is essential to understand their interplay with the genome.

ELIXIR Belgium hosts leading resources for post-translational modifications (Scop3P, UGent), proteome information (Tabloid Proteome, UGent) and biophysics and structural dynamics (b2bTools, VUB) of proteins. We aim to build the “functional genomics” platform, integrating these services and linking them to genomic resources. This will allow scientists to discover variations, mutations, and mistranslations that are not encoded in the genome, post translational modifications that have or have not been charted yet, as well as investigate the impact of such variations on the structure and dynamics of proteins. The platform will be connected to core ELIXIR resources (PDBe-KB, Uniprot), and API services to integrate in analysis platforms (e.g. Galaxy) will be developed. Close collaboration with the ELIXIR Proteomics and the 3D-BioInfo Communities ensures interoperability and sustainability.