What is the difference between Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL?

Swiss-Prot entries are manually reviewed by curators, while TrEMBL entries are annotated by automated methods and are not individually reviewed.

What is an accession number?

A stable identifier for an entry, so researchers can cite the same record even if names change.

Is the displayed length in bases or amino acids?

In amino acids, the building blocks of the protein chain.

Protein Feed Screensaver

The Protein Feed screensaver shows real reviewed entries from UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, the manually curated protein knowledgebase, read key-less from its own REST API. Every row is a protein a curator has read the literature on. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.

How the Protein Feed screensaver works

The saver reads the UniProt REST API directly in your browser — no key and no account.

Real reviewed entries from UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, the manually curated protein knowledgebase, read key-less from its own REST API.

It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.

Colours can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.

UniProtKB and Swiss-Prot curation

UniProt is produced by the UniProt Consortium, a collaboration of EMBL-EBI in the UK, the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Protein Information Resource in the US. Its core resource, the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), has two sections: TrEMBL, whose entries are annotated by automated methods, and Swiss-Prot, whose entries are reviewed by curators who read the published literature.

This feed uses the reviewed Swiss-Prot section. An entry carries a stable accession such as P12345, a protein name, the organism it comes from, the gene, the length of the amino-acid sequence and a summary of its function. Curators weigh experimental evidence in the literature when writing these annotations, which is why reviewed entries are treated as higher quality than automatic ones.

The reviewed set is far smaller than the automatic one, so it covers only part of the proteins known from sequenced genomes. Sequence length is counted in amino acids, which is not the same as mass, and one gene can yield several protein forms, so the number of entries is not the number of genes.

A worked example

Real reviewed entries from UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, the manually curated protein knowledgebase, read key-less from its own REST API. Every row is a protein a curator has read the literature on.

Settings & tips

Accent and Background recolour the display.
Data comes straight from the UniProt REST API in your browser.
Press ESC to leave fullscreen.

Frequently asked questions

Is this real data?: Yes — it comes from the UniProt REST API and is refreshed on a schedule.
Is a key needed?: No. This source is fully key-less.
Is it free?: Yes — free, no download, in your browser.
What is the difference between Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL?: Swiss-Prot entries are manually reviewed by curators, while TrEMBL entries are annotated by automated methods and are not individually reviewed.
What is an accession number?: A stable identifier for an entry, so researchers can cite the same record even if names change.
Is the displayed length in bases or amino acids?: In amino acids, the building blocks of the protein chain.

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