- Course overview
- Search within this course
- Where does the data come from?
- Why do we need UniProt?
- When to use UniProt
- Quiz: Check your learning I
- How to access and navigate UniProt
- How to search UniProt
- Annotation score
- Quiz: Check your learning II
- Exploring a UniProtKB entry
- How to use UniProt tools
- How to get data from UniProt
- How to submit data to UniProt
- When to use UniProt: guided examples
- Exercise: finding entries with 3D structures
- Exercise: mapping other database identifiers to UniProt
- Summary
- Get help and support on UniProt
- References
- Next steps
- Your feedback
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The UniProt databases
There are three UniProt databases:
- The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB)
- The UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef)
- The UniProt Archive (UniParc)
In this tutorial we will only focus on UniProtKB. For more information on UniRef or UniParc, visit the UniProt Quick Tour.
UniProtKB
UniProtKB is the central hub for the collection of functional information on proteins, with accurate, consistent and rich annotation. It consists of two sections:
- Reviewed (UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot) – contains manually annotated records with data added by expert biocurators giving information on protein function, structure, subcellular location, molecular interactions and much more. Each entry in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot represents a single, non redundant gene from a specific organism and all proteins and peptides transcribed by that gene are described within the record.
- Unreviewed (UniProtKB/TrEMBL) – contains computationally analysed records with additional information transferred from related well-annotated records in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot by automatic annotation processes. All identical, full-length protein sequences from the same species are represented in a single record while fragments, isoforms and variants encoded by the same gene are stored in separate entries.
| Planned UniProtKB change In 2026, UniProtKB will be restricted to containing only those sequences which are part of a reference proteome as well as entries in the reviewed UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot section and entries containing additional biologically important data such as a 3D structure. More information about this change is available in the UniProt blog. |