Expert Curation of Proteins in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot

The UniProt KnowledgeBase (UniProtKB) provides a single, centralized, freely available resource for protein sequences and functional information.  For Arabidopsis, our main targets for expert annotation are proteins with some functional characterization and most of them are now included in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. Expert curation combines the manually verified sequence with experimental evidence derived from biochemical and genetic analyses, 3D-structures, mutagenesis experiments, information about protein interactions and post-translational modifications.  Besides harvesting, interpreting, standardizing and integrating data from literature and numerous resources, curators are also checking, and often correcting, gene model predictions. 

Our annotation program has been actively collaborating with other resources. We recently started to collaborate with Araport, the Arabidopsis portal, and we provide Araport with all the gene model corrections that we introduced on the bases of our trans-species family annotation. We are also completing the knowledgebase by importing missing information from EnsemblPlants.

The UniProt consortium is also actively involved in GO annotation and manual annotation has been added to more than 4500 plant proteins. Experimental peptides from high-throughput proteomics experiments that uniquely match the product of a single gene are used to generate annotations describing post-translational modifications and protein processing events. UniProtKB serves as a central hub for biomolecular information with access to more than 100 other resources, such as nucleotide sequence database, 3D protein structure databases, InterPro or MODs.