UniProt: A centralized protein sequence and function resource

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of the UniProt Consortium is to provide a centralized curated, accurate, stable, and comprehensive protein sequence and function resource by enhancing the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) and ensuring that the diverse information in UniProt will be of use to a broad scientific user community by exploiting a range of dissemination strategies. This objective will enable new scientific discoveries in the fields of biomedical research that will enhance human health. The specific aims of the project are: 1. To provide the experimental information associated with proteins through manual curation of the scientific literature. This will be achieved by identifying and curating newly experimentally characterized proteins and by updating existing proteins for new information. Interaction with other manually curated resources will be extended, and community standard interfaces used. 2. To automatically annotate experimentally uncharacterized proteins, increasing both coverage and depth. This will enhance the value of the exponentially growing protein sequence space and allow for the correction of erroneous information. UniProt's rule based system will be made available to the community. 3. To act as the global central hub for protein information. This will be achieved by leveraging data from other resources either as imports or as links/visualization and organizing the data for its optimum use and navigation. New data types will be included as they become available, and the technical infrastructure will be developed to scale with the continued growth in protein sequences. 4. To maintain and further develop UniProt's website and other services. This will be done by creating or incorporating specialized visualizations from other resources for a more intuitive and better overview, and by providing appropriate web services and formats to facilitate the extraction of UniProt's rich data. 5. To actively seek user feedback from and provide training for existing and new user communities. Designated user experience testing and the engagement of new user communities will help to define future directions. Target research communities include researchers working on genetic variation, medical researchers and clinicians, cell biologists and drug discovery/ pharmaceutical researchers. RELEVANCE: The databases produced by the UniProt Consortium provide researchers with an integrated access to protein sequence and function by gathering and enriching data from genomics and proteomics projects as well as the results published by individual researchers. This is a crucial step in making genomics and proteomics research results easily accessible to support biomedical research in academia and industry and hence facilitate the development of preventive and curative strategies for human health.