The UniProt-GO Annotation database in 2011.

The GO annotation dataset provided by the UniProt Consortium (GOA: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA) is a comprehensive set of evidenced-based associations between terms from the Gene Ontology resource and UniProtKB proteins. Currently supplying over 100 million annotations to 11 million proteins in more than 360,000 taxa, this resource has increased 2-fold over the last 2 years and has benefited from a wealth of checks to improve annotation correctness and consistency as well as now supplying a greater information content enabled by GO Consortium annotation format developments. Detailed, manual GO annotations obtained from the curation of peer-reviewed papers are directly contributed by all UniProt curators and supplemented with manual and electronic annotations from 36 model organism and domain-focused scientific resources. The inclusion of high-quality, automatic annotation predictions ensures the UniProt GO annotation dataset supplies functional information to a wide range of proteins, including those from poorly characterized, non-model organism species. UniProt GO annotations are freely available in a range of formats accessible by both file downloads and web-based views. In addition, the introduction of a new, normalized file format in 2010 has made for easier handling of the complete UniProt-GOA data set.

The annotation of both human and mouse kinomes in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot: one small step in manual annotation, one giant leap for full comprehension of genomes.

Biomolecule phosphorylation by protein kinases is a fundamental cell signaling process in all living cells. Following the comprehensive cataloguing of the protein kinase complement of the human genome (Manning, G., Whyte, D. B., Martinez, R., Hunter, T., and Sudarsanam, S. (2002) The protein kinase complement of the human genome. Science 298, 1912-1934), this review will detail the state-of-the-art human and mouse kinase proteomes as provided in the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot protein knowledgebase. The sequences of the 480 classical and up to 24 atypical protein kinases now believed to exist in the human genome and 484 classical and up to 24 atypical kinases within the mouse genome have been reviewed and, where necessary, revised. Extensive annotation has been added to each entry. In an era when a wealth of new databases is emerging on the Internet, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot makes available to the scientific community the most up-to-date and in-depth annotation of these proteins with access to additional external resources linked from within each entry. Incorrect sequence annotations resulting from errors and artifacts have been eliminated. Each entry will be constantly reviewed and updated as new information becomes available with the orthologous enzymes in related species being annotated in a parallel effort and complete kinomes being completed as sequences become available. This ensures that the mammalian kinomes available from UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot are of a consistently high standard with each separate entry acting both as a valuable information resource and a central portal to a wealth of further detail via extensive cross-referencing.