Why is UniProtKB composed of 2 sections, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot and UniProtKB/TrEMBL?

Last modified April 23, 2007

The TrEMBL section of UniProtKB was introduced in 1996 in response to the increased dataflow resulting from genome projects. It was already recognized at that time that the traditional time- and labour-consuming manual annotation process which is the hallmark of Swiss-Prot could not be broadened to encompass all available protein sequences. Publicly available protein sequences obtained from the translation of annotated coding sequences in the EMBL-Bank/GenBank/DDBJ nucleotide sequence database are automatically processed and entered in UniProtKB/TrEMBL where they are computed-annotated in order to make them swiftly available to the public.

UniProtKB/TrEMBL contains high quality computationally analyzed records that are enriched with automatic annotation and classification. These UniProtKB/TrEMBL unreviewed entries are kept separated from the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot manually reviewed entries so that the high quality data of the latter is not diluted in any way.