Decreasing DNA sequencing costs over the past decade has been mirrored by a huge increase in the proportion of uncurated proteins in public databases. Since the early 2000s the cost of sequencing genomes has plummeted by more than 4 orders of magnitude. This has created a glut of raw data, much of which has yet to be curated in terms of definite identification of functional genes and proteins. By 2012, for each curated protein sequence in public databases there were several million uncurated sequences. Data from Pubmed and NCBI.