New Hot Paper Comment by Amos Bairoch

Amos Bairoch answers a few questions about this month's new hot paper in the field of Biology & Biochemistry.

From •>>May 2005 - [late entry]

Field: Biology & Biochemistry
Article Title: UniProt: the Universal Protein knowledgebase
Authors: Apweiler, R;Bairoch, A;Wu, CH;Barker, WC;Boeckmann, B;Ferro, S;Gasteiger, E;Huang, HZ;Lopez, R;Magrane, M;Martin, MJ;Natale, DA;O'Donovan, C;Redaschi, N;Yeh, LSL
Journal: NUCL ACID RES
Volume: 32
Page:
Year: JAN 1 2004
* EMBL Outstn European Bioinformat Inst, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge CB10 1SD, England.
* EMBL Outstn European Bioinformat Inst, Cambridge CB10 1SD, England.
* Ctr Med Univ Geneva, Swiss Inst Bioinformat, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland.
* Georgetown Univ, Med Ctr, Natl Biomed Res Fdn, Washington, DC 20057 USA.
* Georgetown Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Biochem & Mol Biol, Washington, DC 20057 USA.

Why do you think your paper is highly cited?

“The paper describes UniProt which provides to the life science community a comprehensive and high-quality resource on proteins.”

The paper describes UniProt (Universal Protein Resource) which provides to the life sciences community a comprehensive and high-quality resource on proteins. UniProt is a common development of three groups—Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and the Protein Information Resource (PIR)—which are the creators of the Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, and PIR-PSD databases. These databases are used by the majority of life science researchers and, as such, play an important role in the discovery process.

Does it describe a new discovery or a new methodology that's useful to others?

It describes new services that are offered to users of the databases of the UniProt Consortium.

Could you summarize the significance of your paper in layman's terms?

As explained above, we provide an information resource to life scientists. This work can be described as the development and maintenance of a comprehensive and up-to-date encylopedia on proteins.

How did you become involved in this research?

I became involved in the development of what became Swiss-Prot in 1986 while I was working on my Ph.D. thesis, which was targeted towards the development of sequence analysis methods and software tools.

Amos Bairoch
Swiss-Prot Group leader
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Geneva, Switzerland
and
Professor of Bioinformatics
Department of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics
University of Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland

ESI Special Topics, May 2005
Citing URL - http://www.esi-topics.com/nhp/2005/may-05-AmosBairoch.html