Training

We will introduce two popular protein databases provided by the EBI; UniProt and InterPro. These two databases co-operate to provide extensive protein annotation. UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) is a repository for protein sequences and annotation from research literature and bioinformatic tools. In addition to serving as an encyclopaedia-like resource for proteins uniprot.org provides tools (advanced search, BLAST search, align, retrieve, ID mapping) to explore and analyse proteins. InterPro combines a variety of predictive protein signatures (for families, domains, motifs) from groups across the world to classify proteins into families of related function and hence provide automatic annotation to proteins which have no reported experimental information.

Audience

Participants should be confident in the use of PCs and Internet browsing, no previous knowledge of bioinformatics is required.

Modules and Resources

During this course you will learn about:

• Protein sequence databases

UniProt

• Introduction
• Two sides of UniProtKB – TrEMBL – SwissProt
• Contents of a SwissProt entry
• Proteomes
• Automatic annotation
• Searching UniProt

InterPro

• Introduction
• Protein signatures : How they are made, Different types of signatures, Strengths of different signatures
• Role of InterPro
• Searching InterPro

Learning Objectives

After this course you should be able to:

• Appreciate the differences between the major protein sequence databases
• Browse the UniProt database in detail, learning about its structure and the type of data it contains
• Understand what InterPro is and how it can be useful in your research
• Select the most appropriate way to access sequence data for a specific purpose (sequence search, text search...)