SIFTS

Overview

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is home to a number of core bioinformatics databases and services that hold data relevant to the biomedical field, and is thus in a unique position to enhance the annotation of biological data by cross-referencing and mapping between in-house resources. The "Structure Integration with Function, Taxonomy and Sequence" (SIFTS) initiative is a close collaboration between UniProt and the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and aims to improve the integration of structural databases like the PDB and sequence databases like UniProt.

SIFTS is the authoritative source of up-to-date residue-level annotation of structures in the PDB with data available in UniProt, IntEnz, CATH, SCOP, GO, InterPro, Pfam and Pubmed. SIFTS itself is used by major resources such as RCSB, PDBsum, Pfam, SCOP, InterPro, DAS server providers and many research and service groups around the world. The project was started in 2000 and has resulted in creation of a mechanism for enhancing annotation and exchanging data between these two primary data resources.

In the longer term, the project aims to develop a closer integration with other resources such as :

• ChEMBL : protein-ligand interaction data
• ChEBI : ligand chemistry and function data
• IntAct : macromolecular interaction data
• Reactome : biological pathway data
• EnsEMBL : SNPs and genetic variation data