Unknown functions of the majority of human phosphorylation events

Characterize the functions of the currently unknown phosphorylation events in human cells, which comprise more than 95% of known phosphosites, to improve the completeness of prior knowledge used for causal inference in molecular systems biology.

Background

The authors emphasise the importance of prior knowledge for causal inference and note that incompleteness of biological knowledge poses major limitations. As an illustrative example, they highlight that the functional roles of most human phosphorylation events are unknown.

This pervasive knowledge gap directly impacts the ability to construct accurate causal models in molecular systems biology, motivating the need to systematically determine phosphosite functions.