Swiss-Prot is a manually curated biological database of protein sequences. Swiss-Prot was created in 1986 by Amos Bairoch during his PhD and developed by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the European Bioinformatics Institute. Swiss-Prot strives to provide reliable protein sequences associated with a high level of annotation (such as the description of the function of a protein, its domains structure, post-translational modifications, variants, etc.), a minimal level of redundancy and high level of integration with other databases.

In 2002, the UniProt consortium was created: it is a collaboration between the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, the European Bioinfomatics Institute and the Protein Information Resource (PIR), funded by the National Institutes of Health. Swiss-Prot and its automatically curated supplement TrEMBL, have joined with the Protein Information Resource protein database to produce the UniProt Knowledgebase, the world's most comprehensive catalogue of information on proteins. As of 3 April, 2007, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot release 52.2 contains 263,525 entries. As of 3 April, 2007, the UniProtKB/TrEMBL release 35.2 contains 4,232,122 entries.

The UniProt consortium produced 3 database components, each optimised for different uses. The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB (Swiss-Prot + TrEMBL)), the UniProt Non-redundant Reference (UniRef) databases, which combine closely related sequences into a single record to speed similarity searches and the UniProt Archive (UniParc), which is a comprehensive repository of protein sequences, reflecting the history of all protein sequences.

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