Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot Manual and
Automated Annotation of Complete
Proteomes: The Dictyostelium
discoideum Case Study
Amos Bairoch and Lydie Lane
1. Introduction
1.1. What is UniProtKB?
The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), the European
Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and the US-based Protein Information
Resource (PIR) group at Georgetown University Medical Center
and the National Biomedical Research Foundation united 6 years
ago to form the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) Consortium
(www.uniprot.org), which aims at providing a stable, high-quality,
comprehensive, and authoritative resource for protein sequences and
functional information.
The core component provided by the UniProt Consortium is the
UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), which is composed of two sec-
tions: Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL.
1
Swiss-Prot contains nonredundant,
fully annotated records; while TrEMBL contains the computer-
annotated translations of coding sequences (CDSs) proposed by submitters
for every nucleotide sequence incorporated in the public nucleic acid
databases. Taken together, Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL cover all proteins
identified so far, whether characterized or only inferred from nucleotide
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