Swiss-Prot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Swiss-Prot is a manually curated biological database of protein sequences. Swiss-Prot was created in 1986 by Amos Bairoch during his PhD and developed by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the European Bioinformatics Institute. Swiss-Prot strives to provide reliable protein sequences associated with a high level of annotation (such as the description of the function of a protein, its domains structure, post-translational modifications, variants, etc.), a minimal level of redundancy and high level of integration with other databases.
In 2002, the UniProt consortium was created: it is a collaboration between the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, the European Bioinfomatics Institute and the Protein Information Resource (PIR), funded by the National Institutes of Health. Swiss-Prot and its automatically curated supplement TrEMBL, have joined with the Protein Information Resource protein database to produce the UniProt Knowledgebase, the world's most comprehensive catalogue of information on proteins. The UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot release 51.3 from 12 December 2006 contains 250,296 entries.
The UniProt consortium produced 3 database components, each optimised for different uses. The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB (Swiss-Prot + TrEMBL)), the UniProt Non-redundant Reference (UniRef) databases, which combine closely related sequences into a single record to speed similarity searches and the UniProt Archive (UniParc), which is a comprehensive repository of protein sequences, reflecting the history of all protein sequences.
[edit] Reference
- Bairoch A. Serendipity in bioinformatics, the tribulations of a Swiss bioinformatician through exciting times! Bioinformatics. 2000;16:48-64. A historical account by Bairoch.
[edit] External links
- Swiss-Prot Protein Database (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)
- UniProt (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)
