Session:
Primary Biological Databases
Claire O’Donovan (odonovan@ebi.ac.uk), European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus,
Cambridge, UK;
The ability
to store and interconnect all available information on proteins is crucial to
modern biological research. Accordingly, the Universal Protein Resource
(UniProt) plays an ever more important role by providing a stable,
comprehensive, high-quality freely accessible central resource on protein
sequences and functional annotation.
UniProt is
produced by the UniProt consortium, formed by European Bioinformatics Institute
(EBI), Georgetown University Protein Information Resource (PIR) and Swiss
Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). The core activities of UniProt include
manual curation of protein sequences assisted by automated annotation, sequence
archiving, development of a user-friendly UniProt web site, and providing additional
value-added information on proteins through cross-references to other
databases. UniProt comprises three database components, each of which
addresses a key need in protein bioinformatics. The UniProt
Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) provides protein sequences with extensive
annotation and cross-references. The UniProt Archive (UniParc) is
the main sequence storehouse. The UniProt Reference Clusters
(UniRef) condense sequence information and annotation to facilitate
both sequence similarity searches and analyses of the results.
Keywords:
Protein, amino acid sequence, database, annotation