The removal of annotation from biological databases is often taken to mean that the annotation was wrong in the first place. Why else would diligent biocuators remove information that had been painstakingly added to database entries?

In our recent paper, ‘GO annotation in InterPro: why stability does not indicate accuracy in a sea of changing annotations’, we look at some of the diverse, data-driven changes that can underlie the deletion or update of Gene Ontology annotations in the InterPro database, and highlight some of the consequent effects of these changes on UniProt protein annotations. We also explain why these changes don’t necessarily mean that the original annotations were unreliable. Alternatively, we argue that they signify a curation effort committed to annotation accuracy, attempting to navigate an ever-changing ocean of biological knowledge.