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Swiss-Prot

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.^[1] 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.

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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.^[2] As of 3 April, 2007, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot release 52.2 contains 263,525 entries. As of 3 April, 2007, the UniProtKB/TrEMBL release 35.2 contains 4,232,122 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.

References

^ Bairoch Amos (2000). "Serendipity in bioinformatics, the tribulations of a Swiss bioinformatician through exciting times!". Bioinformatics 16: 48-64. PMID 10812477. — a historical account by Bairoch.
^ Wu, C.H. et al. (January 2006) "The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt): an expanding universe of protein information.". Nucleic Acids Research, 1;34 (Database issue): D187–91.