The aim of the UniProt Knowledgebase is to provide users with a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible set of protein sequences annotated with functional information. In this article, we describe significant updates that we have made over the last two years to the resource. The number of sequences in UniProtKB has risen to approximately 190 million, despite continued work to reduce sequence redundancy at the proteome level. We have adopted new methods of assessing proteome completeness and quality. We continue to extract detailed annotations from the literature to add to reviewed entries and supplement these in unreviewed entries with annotations provided by automated systems such as the newly implemented Association-Rule-Based Annotator (ARBA). We have developed a credit-based publication submission interface to allow the community to contribute publications and annotations to UniProt entries. We describe how UniProtKB responded to the COVID-19 pandemic through expert curation of relevant entries that were rapidly made available to the research community through a dedicated portal. UniProt resources are available under a CC-BY (4.0) license via the web at https://www.uniprot.org/.

ExPASy (http://www.expasy.org) has worldwide reputation as one of the main bioinformatics resources for proteomics. It has now evolved, becoming an extensible and integrative portal accessing many scientific resources, databases and software tools in different areas of life sciences. Scientists can henceforth access seamlessly a wide range of resources in many different domains, such as proteomics, genomics, phylogeny/evolution, systems biology, population genetics, transcriptomics, etc. The individual resources (databases, web-based and downloadable software tools) are hosted in a ‘decentralized’ way by different groups of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and partner institutions. Specifically, a single web portal provides a common entry point to a wide range of resources developed and operated by different SIB groups and external institutions. The portal features a search function across ‘selected’ resources. Additionally, the availability and usage of resources are monitored. The portal is aimed for both expert users and people who are not familiar with a specific domain in life sciences. The new web interface provides, in particular, visual guidance for newcomers to ExPASy.

The aim of the UniProt Knowledgebase is to provide users with a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible set of protein sequences annotated with functional information. In this publication we describe enhancements made to our data processing pipeline and to our website to adapt to an ever-increasing information content. The number of sequences in UniProtKB has risen to over 227 million and we are working towards including a reference proteome for each taxonomic group. We continue to extract detailed annotations from the literature to update or create reviewed entries, while unreviewed entries are supplemented with annotations provided by automated systems using a variety of machine-learning techniques. In addition, the scientific community continues their contributions of publications and annotations to UniProt entries of their interest. Finally, we describe our new website (https://www.uniprot.org/), designed to enhance our users’ experience and make our data easily accessible to the research community. This interface includes access to AlphaFold structures for more than 85% of all entries as well as improved visualisations for subcellular localisation of proteins.

The growth in the number of completely sequenced microbial genomes (bacterial and archaeal) has generated a need for a procedure that provides UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot-quality annotation to as many protein sequences as possible. We have devised a semi-automated system, HAMAP (High-quality Automated and Manual Annotation of microbial Proteomes), that uses manually built annotation templates for protein families to propagate annotation to all members of manually defined protein families, using very strict criteria. The HAMAP system is composed of two databases, the proteome database and the family database, and of an automatic annotation pipeline. The proteome database comprises biological and sequence information for each completely sequenced microbial proteome, and it offers several tools for CDS searches, BLAST options and retrieval of specific sets of proteins. The family database currently comprises more than 1500 manually curated protein families and their annotation templates that are used to annotate proteins that belong to one of the HAMAP families. On the HAMAP website, individual sequences as well as whole genomes can be scanned against all HAMAP families. The system provides warnings for the absence of conserved amino acid residues, unusual sequence length, etc. Thanks to the implementation of HAMAP, more than 200 000 microbial proteins have been fully annotated in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot (HAMAP website: http://www.expasy.org/sprot/hamap).