UniProt: the universal protein knowledgebase in 2021

TLDR

UniProt aims to provide a comprehensive, high‑quality, freely accessible set of protein sequences annotated with functional information. The resource incorporates new proteome‑completeness assessment methods, literature‑derived annotations, automated annotation via ARBA, and a credit‑based publication submission interface to enable community contributions. UniProtKB now contains about 190 million sequences and rapidly curated COVID‑19 related entries through a dedicated portal. UniProt resources are available under a CC‑BY (4.0) license via https://www.uniprot.org/.

Abstract

The aim of the UniProt Knowledgebase is to provide users with a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible set of protein sequences annotated with functional information. In this article, we describe significant updates that we have made over the last two years to the resource. The number of sequences in UniProtKB has risen to approximately 190 million, despite continued work to reduce sequence redundancy at the proteome level. We have adopted new methods of assessing proteome completeness and quality. We continue to extract detailed annotations from the literature to add to reviewed entries and supplement these in unreviewed entries with annotations provided by automated systems such as the newly implemented Association-Rule-Based Annotator (ARBA). We have developed a credit-based publication submission interface to allow the community to contribute publications and annotations to UniProt entries. We describe how UniProtKB responded to the COVID-19 pandemic through expert curation of relevant entries that were rapidly made available to the research community through a dedicated portal. UniProt resources are available under a CC-BY (4.0) license via the web at https://www.uniprot.org/.