Searching and Navigating UniProt Databases

The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) is a comprehensive resource for protein sequence and annotation data. The UniProt website receives approximately 400,000 unique visitors per month and is the primary means to access UniProt. It provides ten searchable datasets and three main tools. The key UniProt datasets are the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), the UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef) and the UniProt Archive (UniParc) and protein sets for completely sequenced genomes (Proteomes). Other supporting datasets include information about proteins that is present in UniProtKB protein entries like literature citations, taxonomy, subcellular locations, etc. This paper focuses on how to use UniProt datasets. The basic protocol describes navigation and searching mechanisms for the UniProt datasets while two alternative protocols build on the basic protocol to describe advanced search and query building.