SWISSPROT

Swiss-Prot is a curated protein sequence database that forms the manually reviewed portion of the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB). It is designed to be a high-quality resource for protein function and annotation, emphasizing accuracy and non-redundancy through expert curation. Each entry combines curated functional information with experimental evidence, cross-references to primary literature, and links to other biological databases.

Historically founded by Amos Bairoch in 1986 at the University of Geneva as Swiss-Prot, the database became part of the UniProt project to integrate protein knowledge resources. In UniProtKB, Swiss-Prot serves as the reviewed, curated section and is complemented by TrEMBL, which contains automatically annotated entries that have not yet been manually reviewed.

Content and structure: Swiss-Prot entries provide information on protein function, enzyme activity, catalytic residues, subcellular localization, tissue specificity, expression patterns, involvement in diseases, domain architectures, post-translational modifications, and protein–protein interactions. Each entry includes literature references and evidence codes that help users assess reliability and provenance. The database also offers extensive cross-references to external resources such as Gene Ontology, Pfam, InterPro, PDB, and KEGG.

Access and impact: Swiss-Prot data are accessible via the UniProt website and downloadable in multiple formats, including FASTA and UniProt flat files. The resource is widely used in genomics, proteomics, and biomedical research as a high-quality reference for protein knowledge and as a standard for automated annotation pipelines.