A protein encyclopedia
In 1986, University of Geneva professor Amos Bairoch created the Swiss-Prot database, an encyclopedia of proteins used by hundreds of thousands of scientists the world over. More than 30,000 people access it daily. “Our primary mission is to manually verify protein sequences from thousands of different organisms, and make available the biological information associated with them,” explains Marie-Claude Blatter,communications manager for the group.
Since 2003, Swiss-Prot (Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics) has been part of the UniProt consortium, together with the European Institute for Bioinformatics in the UK and the Protein Resource in the U.S. “We are trying to respond to a pressing research need: rapid access to high-quality data,” says Blatter. “It’s a fascinating if painstaking job.”
