Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) has the mission to promote research, the development of databanks and computer technologies, and teaching and service activities within the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland, with international collaborations. The Swiss-Prot group of the SIB, headed by Prof. Amos Bairoch, is responsible, in collaboration with EBI and the Protein Information Resource (PIR), for the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot protein knowledgebase (http://www.uniprot.org/ and http://www.uniprot.org/), a curated protein sequence database which strives for high annotation standards and a high level of integration with other databases. The Swiss-Prot group also maintains and distributes related databases including PROSITE (http://www.expasy.org/prosite/), a database of protein families and domains, ENZYME (http://www.expasy.org/enzyme/), a repository of information relative to the nomenclature of enzymes and NEWT (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/newt/index.html), a database of taxonomy. The Swiss-Prot group is also involved in the diffusion of bioinformatic resources to the international community through the ExPASy (Expert Protein Analysis System) proteomics server, which is maintained by the SIB (http://www.expasy.org/).