Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Michel Schneider , Anne Estreicher , Amos Bairoch
The Swiss-Prot knowledgebase is a curated protein sequence database, which strives to provide high quality annotation, a minimal level of redundancy and a high level of integration with other databases. Although the content currently originates from more than 8’600 different species, we mainly focus on the annotation of proteins from model organisms such as human, mouse, Arabidopsis thaliana, Drosophila melanogaster or C.elegans for example.
In this context, two major annotation programs were initiated: the Human Proteomics Initiative (HPI) that aims to the annotation of all known human protein sequences and their mammalian counterparts, and the Plant Protein Annotation Program (PPAP) whose main goal is the annotation of proteins from the model plant organism Arabidopsis thaliana to ensure the presence of high quality annotation of representative members of all plant specific protein families.
Swiss-Prot annotation put a special emphasis on actors which play a part in generating high levels of protein diversity, mainly alternative splicing, post-translational modifications and polymorphisms. In addition to bibliographic references, experimental results, computed features, direct links to specialised databases connect amino acid sequences with the current knowledge in animal and plant sciences.
As protein families and specific proteins are regularly reviewed to keep up with current scientific findings, the wealth of information found in the Swiss-Prot knowledgebase and the numerous software tools provided on the ExPASy web site (http://www.expasy.org/) will also help to identify and reveal the function of proteins from many species other than model organisms.