Mining locus tags in PubMed Central to improve microbial gene annotation

The scientific literature contains millions of microbial gene identifiers within the full text and tables, but these annotations rarely get incorporated into public sequence databases. We propose to utilize the Open Access (OA) subset of PubMed Central (PMC) as a gene annotation database and have developed an R package called pmcXML to automatically mine and extract locus tags from full text, tables and supplements.