The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and GeneBio have launched neXtProt, an on-line knowledge platform on human proteins to provide life scientists with a broad spectrum of information on all human proteins via an intuitive interface. Since its Beta release in January 2011, it has already had more than 51,000 unique visitors.
Gathering as much data as possible on human genes and proteins is essential to scientists focusing on human health and disease. SIB and GeneBio's scientists, software developers, and biocurators have been working closely together since 2009 under the leadership of Professor Amos Bairoch, to make sense of the huge body of data on human proteins.
Prof. Bairoch said: 'Technological advances have allowed life scientists to accumulate enormous amounts of data. It is therefore essential to provide researchers with the tools to fish out knowledge from such an ocean of data. We are building neXtProt to answer such a challenge.'
At the content level, neXtProt aims to be a comprehensive resource on human proteins, including information such as proteins' function, subcellular location, expression, interactions and role in diseases. neXtProt builds upon the complete human proteins-related information contained in the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot knowledgebase, to which unique information relative to protein expression and variants has been integrated by the SIB biocurators.
