Release 6.4

A city-sized crowd of authors

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot is a manually annotated protein knowledgebase. This involves not only sequence curation, but also a critical review of the scientific literature. All references used to create an entry are always cited, whether they are complex publications or simple submissions. Currently, there are more than 1'600 journals referenced in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, and more than 210'000 distinct authors.

Bringing all these authors together for a meeting would result in a gathering of a size similar to that of Geneva, the city where UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot was created and is still based... A small, Swiss city with an international vocation, a little like UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, which began as a local project of a graduate student with quite an ambitious aim: providing the scientific community throughout the world with a central hub for sharing biological knowledge. To achieve this goal, the Swiss-Prot group very quickly developped a strong and fruitful collaboration with the European Institute of Bioinformatics (EBI) and more recently with the Protein Information Resource (PIR) of the Georgetown University Medical Center in USA (http://www.expasy.uniprot.org/). The Swiss-Prot group is not only international but also interdisciplinary. Various educational backgrounds are mixed: biologists, biochemists, programmers, mathematicians, wet lab experts or students, etc. This team work is what ensures the quality of the knowledgebase.