About us People & groups

Maria Martin’s team provides the bioinformatics infrastructure for the databases and services of the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt). The team consists of software engineers and bioinformaticians responsible for the UniProt and Gene Ontology Annotation software and database development, and the study of novel automatic methods for protein annotation and representation. A user experience analyst in the team coordinates the user request gathering process for the design and development of the web site. The team is also responsible for the maintenance and development of tools for UniProt curation. Maria’s team works in a fully complementary fashion with Claire O’Donovan’s UniProt content group to provide essential resources to the biological community such that databases have become an integral part of the tools researchers use on a daily basis for their work.

The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) is a comprehensive resource for protein sequence and functional annotation data. UniProt is comprised of four major components, each optimized for different uses. The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) is an expertly curated database, a central access point for integrated protein information with cross-references to multiple sources. The UniProt Archive (UniParc) is a comprehensive sequence repository, reflecting the history of all protein sequences. UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef) merge closely related sequences based on sequence identity to speed up searches while the UniProt Metagenomic and Environmental Sequences database (UniMES) was created to respond to the expanding area of metagenomic data. The UniProt GO annotation (GOA) program aims to add high-quality GO annotations to proteins in the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB).