UniProt : The Universal Protein Resource

The Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, and PIR protein database activities have united to form the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt), which provides a central resource on protein sequences and functional annotation with three database components, each addressing a key need in protein bioinformatics. The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), comprising the manually annotated UniProtKBSwiss-Prot section and the automatically annotated UniProtKBTrEMBL section, is the preeminent storehouse of protein annotation. The extensive cross-references, functional and feature annotations, and literature-based evidence attribution enable scientists to analyze proteins and query across databases. The UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef) speed similarity searches via sequence space compression by merging sequences that are 100% (UniRef100), 90% (UniRef90), or 50% (UniRef50) identical. Finally, the UniProt Archive (UniParc) stores all publicly available protein sequences, containing the history of sequence data with links to the source databases. The UniProt databases continue to grow in size and in availability of information. New download availability includes all major releases of UniProtKB, sequence collections by taxonomic division, and complete proteomes. A bibliography mapping service has been added, and an ID mapping service is available.