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UniProt release 2011_06

Published May 31, 2011

Headline

New biocuration pages on UniProt website

One of the central activities of the UniProt Consortium is the biocuration of the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB). This involves the integration and interpretation of information from a variety of sources as well as accurate and comprehensive representation of the data. The biocuration process adds a wealth of information to UniProtKB records including information related to the role of a protein such as its function, structure, subcellular location, interactions with other proteins, and domain composition, as well as a wide range of sequence features such as active sites and post-translational modifications.

Both manual and automatic approaches are used to add information to UniProtKB records. Manual curation provides high-quality data for experimentally characterised proteins and consists of a critical review of experimental and predicted data for each protein as well as manual verification of each protein sequence. This information is included in the manually reviewed Swiss-Prot section of UniProtKB. In response to the ever-increasing amounts of sequence data, automated methods have been developed by the UniProt Consortium to annotate uncharacterised proteins with a high degree of accuracy and these methods are used to enhance the unreviewed records in UniProtKB/TrEMBL by enriching them with automatic classification and annotation.

In order to keep UniProt users informed of curation practices and priorities within the project, the UniProt website has been updated to include a new section describing UniProt biocuration. This section provides an overview of the manual curation process as well as details of current manual curation priorities. In addition, information is provided about the automatic annotation systems developed and used within the group. Additional useful information such as statistics, links to related resources and relevant publications are also provided.

The pages will continue to be updated on a regular basis to provide users with the latest information about the UniProt curation process and activities.

UniProtKB News

Changes concerning the controlled vocabulary for PTMs

New term for the feature key ‘Cross-link’ (‘CROSSLNK’ in the flat file):
  • S-(2-aminovinyl)-D-cysteine (Cys-Cys)

Changes to keywords

Modified keyword: