Keywords

This subsection of the ‘Ontologies’ section lists selected keyword(s), derived from a thesaurus of controlled vocabulary with a hierarchical structure. Keywords summarise the content of a UniProtKB entry and facilitates the search of proteins of interest.

Keywords are classified in 10 categories:

• Biological process
• Cellular component
• Coding sequence diversity
• Developmental stage
• Disease
• Domain
• Ligand
• Molecular function
• Post-translational modification
• Technical term

An entry often contains several keywords. Inside a category, the keywords are stored by alphabetical order.
Example: P05067

Keywords can be used to retrieve subsets of protein entries or to generate indexes of entries based on functional, structural, or other categories.

Keywords in UniProtKB/TrEMBL

UniProtKB/TrEMBL makes use of the same list of keywords as UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot but, because most keywords in an entry are added in the manual annotation process, UniProtKB/TrEMBL entries generally contain fewer keywords than UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot entries. The main sources of UniProtKB/TrEMBL keywords are:

• The underlying nucleotide entry. The nucleotide databases (e.g. EMBL) contain keywords that are transferred to the corresponding UniProtKB/TrEMBL entry provided they are also present in the UniProtKB keyword list.
• The program which creates UniProtKB/TrEMBL entries. This adds keywords based on information in the underlying nucleotide entry. For example, if a nucleotide entry contains the word “kinase” in the description field, the program will add the keyword “Kinase” to the corresponding UniProtKB/TrEMBL entry.
• Automatic annotation.

Link to relevant documents