UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot: New and Future Developments

Abstract

The Swiss-Prot knowledgebase [1] was created in 1986. It is now the cornerstone of the UniProt consortium [2] efforts that aims to provide to life scientists a wide range of information concerning proteins.

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot provides concise, but thorough, descriptions of a non-redundant set of proteins, including their function, domain structure, post-translational modifications and variants. Swiss-Prot is tightly integrated with other databases, allowing the user to move seamlessly from sequence-based information to related information such as a protein’s three-dimensional structure or its coding sequence. High quality manual annotation is what makes Swiss-Prot so useful to its academic and industrial users. Its unparalleled level of annotation is the fruit of manual curation by highly qualified biologists, who use their understanding of biology and the vast amount of information available in the scientific literature to provide accurate descriptions of each protein’s features.

The driving factors in the development of the knowledgebase are:

• To constantly add new entries;

• To regularly update existing entries by adding newly available data;

• To provide new type of information;

• To standardize existing information to facilitate their retrieval and programmatic access by bioinformatics tools.