Murphy Lab SLIF Service

Murphy Lab SLIF Service

SLIF (Subcellular Location Image Finder) automatically extracts information about protein subcellular locations from figure-caption pairs in biological literature. SLIF separates figures into panels and decides which panels contain fluorescence microscope images (FMI). It applies image processing methods to analyze the FMI and extract a quantitative description of the localization patterns they display. The associated captions are also processed to identify which portions of the caption refer to which panels and to identify the names of proteins contained in the captions. The results of this analysis are stored in the SLIF database, which can be queried either interactively (using the links at the left) or via external program-generated links.

Our long-term goal is to develop a large library of annotated and analyzed fluorescence microscope images, in order to support data-mining. The currently version of the database contains records for 15180 papers from volumes 94-99 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), generously made available by the Academy for demonstration purposes. The database will be expanded shortly to include all articles in BMC Central and Pubmed Central.