“UniProt is a freely accessible information resource for life scientists and can be compared to the development and maintenance of a comprehensive and up-to-date encylopedia on proteins.”

The paper describes UniProt (Universal Protein Resource), which provides the life science community with a freely accessible, comprehensive high-quality resource on proteins. UniProt is a common development of three groups at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), and the Protein Information Resource (PIR). The UniProt databases are used by the majority of life science researchers and thus play an important role in research and development.

It describes new services that are offered to users of the UniProt databases.

UniProt is a freely accessible information resource for life scientists and can be compared to the development and maintenance of a comprehensive and up-to-date encyclopedia on proteins.

I became involved in the development of Swiss-Prot, one of the databases that are now part of the UniProt resource, as a student in 1986. The biggest problem was, and still is, to keep pace with the dramatic development of biology, to adapt the databases to the changes, and to secure the necessary funding to do so.

In the future, we need to pay more attention to the incorporation of datasets from large-scale experiments into the UniProt databases.

The UniProt databases make the results of the scientific community in genome and protein research freely accessible world-wide to the scientific community and interested lay persons.