Uniprot ids hard to understand

[RonanDaly]

It's been noted that people don't understand UniProt ids. Is there a better name we can display on the screen? I know we tried the full names which were way too long, but would something like Gene name work?

[joewandy]

I also encountered the same problem when trying to make sense of the Covid protein data. The paper mostly uses gene names to describe the proteins, so it's very cumbersome having to click each one of the proteins and find out the gene names.

For example,

Our data uncovered dysregulation of multiple apolipoproteins including 175 APOA1, APOA2, APOH, APOL1, APOD and APOM (Figure 3A). Most of them 176 are associated with macrophage functions and were down-regulated. 177 Decrease of APOA1 in serum has been reported during the transition of 178 COVID-19 patients from mild to severe illness (Nie et al., 2020).

Turns out that the UniProt ID for APOA1 is P02647, but this was quite difficult to find after clicking each entry!

One way is to display data in this format <UniProt ID>_<Gene name> in the table. This way we can see both.

[RonanDaly]

Would this be too long, or just about right? Compounds names are sometimes quite long anyway.