This work describes the biocuration of the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, and how this has contributed to the development of fission yeast as a model species. I recount the curation and refinement of the gene complement, and manually curated ortholog inventories and describe how these two resources have been pivotal for comparative analysis. I outline the mechanisms of functional curation using ontologies, the PomBase community curation initiative and ongoing curation work to construct a qualitative model of cellular pathways. I describe how functional curation has been used to analyse important genome-wide datasets. Finally, the tools and resources developed to curate, display and enable interrogation and reuse of data are outlined.
