What is UniProt and what information does it provide?

UniProt (Universal Protein Resource) is a comprehensive database of protein sequence and functional information. It consists of three main components: UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot (manually reviewed, high-quality annotations), UniProtKB/TrEMBL (automatically annotated, unreviewed), and UniRef (clustered sequences for faster searching). UniProt provides information on protein function, domains, post-translational modifications, subcellular location, tissue specificity, disease associations, and 3D structures. It links to other databases and is essential for functional annotation of proteins and proteomics research.