About PANTHER
The PANTHER (Protein ANalysis THrough Evolutionary Relationships) Classification System was designed to classify proteins (and their genes) in order to facilitate high-throughput analysis. Proteins have been classified according to:
- Family and subfamily: families are groups of evolutionarily related proteins; subfamilies are related proteins that also have the same function
- Molecular function: the function of the protein by itself or with directly interacting proteins at a biochemical level, e.g. a protein kinase
- Biological process: the function of the protein in the context of a larger network of proteins that interact to accomplish a process at the level of the cell or organism, e.g. mitosis.
- Pathway: similar to biological process, but a pathway also explicitly specifies the relationships between the interacting molecules.
The PANTHER Classifications are the result of human curation as well as sophisticated bioinformatics algorithms. Details of the methods can be found in (Thomas et al., Genome Research 2003; Mi et al. NAR 2005).
For more information about the data on PANTHER and the relationships between data types, see the "PANTHER Data Overview" figure.
Version 6.1 (release date December 17, 2007) contains 5547 protein families, divided into 24,582 functionally distinct protein subfamilies.