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About UniProt

The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) is a comprehensive resource for protein sequence and annotation data. The UniProt databases are the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), the UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef), and the UniProt Archive (UniParc). The UniProt Metagenomic and Environmental Sequences (UniMES) database is a repository specifically developed for metagenomic and environmental data.

UniProt is a collaboration between the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and the Protein Information Resource (PIR). Across the three institutes close to 150 people are involved through different tasks such as database curation, software development and support.

Until a few years ago, EBI and SIB together produced Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL, while PIR produced the Protein Sequence Database (PIR-PSD). These two data sets coexisted with different protein sequence coverage and annotation priorities. TrEMBL (Translated EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Data Library) was originally created because sequence data was being generated at a pace that exceeded Swiss-Prot's ability to keep up. Meanwhile, PIR maintained the PIR-PSD and related databases, including iProClass, a database of protein sequences and curated families. In 2002 the three institutes decided to pool their resources and expertise and formed the UniProt Consortium.

Funding

UniProt is mainly supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant 2 U01 HG02712-05. Additional support for the EBI's involvement in UniProt comes from the European Commission (EC)'s FELICS grant (021902RII3) and from the NIH GO grant 2P41HG02273-07. Swiss-Prot activities at the SIB are supported by the Swiss Federal Government through the Federal Office of Education and Science, by the European Commission FELICS grant (021902RII3) and by the PATRIC BRC (NIH/NIAID contract HHSN 266200400035C). PIR activities are also supported by the NIH grants and contracts HHSN266200400061C, NCI-caBIG, and 1R01GM080646-01, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant IIS-0430743.

Further Information