Glossary

UniProt is a comprehensive and freely accessible database of protein strings and functional information, established by EBI, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), and the Protein Information Resource (PIR).

The most important component of UniProt is UniProtKB, a protein database that comprises two main parts:

• Swiss-Prot is a manually annotated and reviewed protein database.
• TrEMBL is an automatically generated protein database that is formed by automatically translating nucleic acid sequences taken from coding regions of genes obtained from a variety of sources around the world.

UniProt uses a database format similar to that employed by EMBL, although it differs slightly in annotation; a detailed description of UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot format provided here.