Cited by 1,613Genomics and Phylogenetic StudiesBioinformatics and Genomic NetworksAdvanced Proteomics Techniques and Applications

UniRef: comprehensive and non-redundant UniProt reference clusters

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Suzek, Baris E., Huang, Hongzhan, McGarvey, Peter, Mazumder, Raja, Wu, Cathy H.·2007·Bioinformatics

Abstract

MOTIVATION: Redundant protein sequences in biological databases hinder sequence similarity searches and make interpretation of search results difficult. Clustering of protein sequence space based on sequence similarity helps organize all sequences into manageable datasets and reduces sampling bias and overrepresentation of sequences. RESULTS: The UniRef (UniProt Reference Clusters) provide clustered sets of sequences from the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) and selected UniProt Archive records to obtain complete coverage of sequence space at several resolutions while hiding redundant sequences. Currently covering >4 million source sequences, the UniRef100 database combines identical sequences and subfragments from any source organism into a single UniRef entry. UniRef90 and UniRef50 are built by clustering UniRef100 sequences at the 90 or 50% sequence identity levels. UniRef100, UniRef90 and UniRef50 yield a database size reduction of approximately 10, 40 and 70%, respectively, from the source sequence set. The reduced redundancy increases the speed of similarity searches and improves detection of distant relationships. UniRef entries contain summary cluster and membership information, including the sequence of a representative protein, member count and common taxonomy of the cluster, the accession numbers of all the merged entries and links to rich functional annotation in UniProtKB to facilitate biological discovery. UniRef has already been applied to broad research areas ranging from genome annotation to proteomics data analysis. AVAILABILITY: UniRef is updated biweekly and is available for online search and retrieval at http://www.uniprot.org, as well as for download at ftp://ftp.uniprot.org/pub/databases/uniprot/uniref. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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Crossref · 10.1093/bioinformatics/btm098

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  • The second non-interacting set contains 1964 unique mammalian protein complexes filtered against IntAct from Negatome.

    “The second set contains 1964 unique mammalian protein complexes filtered against the IntAct43 dataset from Negatome31.”

    From Improved prediction of protein-protein interactions using AlphaFold2 (2021) · cites this paper as [43]

    The Abstract and §2.1 Source data describe UniRef protein-sequence clusters built from UniProtKB and UniParc, not a set of non-interacting mammalian protein complexes. Searches for “1964,” “Negatome,” and “IntAct” found no passage in our copy addressing the claimed set or filtering step. (LLM, conf=0.78)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Authors
Suzek, B. E., Huang, H., McGarvey, P., Mazumder, R., & Wu, C. H.
Affiliations
  • Protein Information Resource, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular & Cellular Biology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC 20007, USA
  • Georgetown University Medical Center (US)
Venue
Bioinformatics
Published
2007-03-22
Volume
23
Issue
10
Pages
1282-1288
ISSN
  • 1367-4803 (ISSN-L)
  • 1367-4811
OpenAlex
W2076048958
Cited by
1,613
References
51
Citations by year
2026: 137 · 2025: 197 · 2024: 164 · 2023: 132 · 2022: 93 · 2021: 84 · 2020: 68 · 2019: 69 · 2018: 55 · 2017: 74 · 2016: 87 · 2015: 91 · 2014: 64 · 2013: 82 · 2012: 63
FWCI
13.26
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by-nc
Locations
  • Bioinformatics (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • European Bioinformatics Institute
  • National Institutes of Health
  • National Human Genome Research Institute (U01HG02712, U01HG002712)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
  • Physical Sciences › Chemistry › Spectroscopy › Advanced Proteomics Techniques and Applications
Keywords
protein sequence clustering, sequence similarity search, protein sequence space, distant homology detection, functional annotation
MeSH terms
Amino Acid Sequence, Animals, Humans, Proteins, Information Storage and Retrieval, Computational Biology, Databases, Protein

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