Dept. Medical Biochemistry, University of Geneva
SWISS-PROT is a curated protein sequence database which strives to provide a high level of annotations (such as the description of the function of a protein, its domains structure, post-translational modifications, variants, etc), a minimal level of redundancy and high level of integration with other databases. It was created in 1986 and since 1988 it is a collaborative endeavor of the Department of Medical Biochemistry of the University of Geneva and the EMBL Data Library group, now part of the European BioInformatic Institute (EBI). It currently contains about 60'000 annotated sequence entries from 5000 species. It is used by an estimated 200 thousand users worldwide and accessed through many different distribution media - the most popular one being currently the World Wide Web (WWW).
SWISS-PROT is now faced with a number of crisis which we will discuss during this meeting. These crisis are symptomatic of the huge changes that are now going through the combined world of biological, medical and biotechnological research. Questions such as how to deal with the current exponential increase of sequence data, the future increase in proteome project derived characterization data, the problems of public versus commercial funding and therefore access of macromolecular databases as well as more and more blurred distinction between journals and databases will be broached.
I strongly believe that nobody can predict how SWISS-PROT or any molecular biology database will look like in 2006, we can only be sure that many changes will take place and that we are lucky (or unlucky !) to leave in a very very interesting time in the history of biological sciences.