Swiss-Prot

Swiss-Prot is a manually curated biological database of protein sequences started by Amos Bairoch and developed by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Content

Swiss-Prot strives to provide reliable protein sequences associated with a high level of annotation, including each of the following: *the description of the function of a protein;

• its domains structure;
• post-translational modifications;
• variants;
• a minimal level of redundancy;
• a high level of integration with other databases;
• etc.

Database types

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.

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.

Statistics

As of 11 July 2012, release "2012_07" of UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot contains 536,789 sequence entries (comprising 190,518,892 amino acids abstracted from 211,308 references) and release "2012_06" of UniProtKB/TrEMBL contains 226,60,469 sequence entries (comprising 7,407,531,063 amino acids).

External links

• Swiss-Prot Protein Database (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)
• UniProt (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)
• Definition of Swiss-Prot format files