Swiss Prot

Summary: Because of the large amounts of information and the multitude of cross-referencing, Swiss-Prot is the best starting point for protein sequence searches. If you cannot find the information that you are looking for, you should be able to locate another means of searching for it.

Swiss-Prot is a curated protein sequence database and has three features that make it especially useful. First, nearly 99% of all sequences are annotated, and other information is provided in addition to the sequence. Second, data have been merged to minimize the redundancy of the database. Finally, Swiss-Prot is integrated with other databases (12 others as of July 1996) and therefore contains many references to those other databases where you can go for more information.

Important additional information about Swiss-Prot's keyword list and a User Manual can both be found on ExPasy, the home server of the Swiss-Prot database.

All Swiss-Prot entries contain accession numbers assigned by EMBL. This is useful because Swiss-Prot sequences are listed by amino acid sequence whereas EMBL maintains its entries in cDNA sequence format. Other databases whose reference numbers can be found on Swiss-Prot entries include PIR, ECOGENE, and PRODOM.

See dictionary entries for: [amino acid | cDNA sequence].

Note: Before you begin using Swiss-Prot, it will benefit you to become more familiar with the amino acids and their abbreviations. We have a complete listing in plain text.

Searching Swiss-Prot is possible via a multitude of various routes. As a matter of fact, there are so many routes that it can overwhelm and confuse you. Various searches available on Swiss-Prot are:

One can even search with the Sequence Retrieval System, a very thorough means of searching many molecular biology databases at once.

We have provided an example for searching Swiss-Prot to help you get started.

Last updated: July 23, 1998
URL: http://biotech.icmb.utexas.edu/pages/science/swissprot.html
Questions or Comments: feedback@biotech.icmb.utexas.edu
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