Release 7.6

5,000 rat entries in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot

While in imperial China the rat was associated with creativity, honesty and generosity, western culture tends to see them as vicious, unclean, parasitic animals that steal food and spread disease. Whatever your feelings towards this small rodent are, for modern biologists rats have proved to be a good animal model for many human diseases, such as diabetes, arthritis and cardiovascular diseases. Despite its importance for medical research and although its genome sequence has been published in 2004, the amount of sequence data available is still much smaller than for the other two best studied mammals, namely human and mouse. The number of rat ESTs at the NCBI is only 11% of that of human and 18% of that of mouse. Not many high-throughput cDNA sequencing projects have been initiated and, in the NIH Mammalian Gene Collection, rat sequences represent less than one quarter of human ones. As a result, this trend is also observed in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, which is highly dependent upon submissions of sequence data to the public DNA sequence databases EMBL/GenBank/DDBJ. In UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, rat is the third best represented mammal, after human and mouse. With more than 5,000 entries, it is still underrepresented compared to human and mouse. However, new rat entries are continuously integrated in order to represent all mammalian orthologs of human proteins. Our final aim is to provide our users with a complete set of rat proteins.