The Protein Information Resource (PIR), located at

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

Medical Center, is an integrated public

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

resource to support genomic and

proteomic Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins are vital parts of living organisms, with many functions such as the formation of structural fibers of muscle tissue, enzymatic digestion of food, or synthesis and replication of DNA. In ...

research, and scientific studies. It contains protein sequences databases

History

PIR was established in 1984 by the National Biomedical Research Foundation as a resource to assist researchers and customers in the identification and interpretation of

protein sequence Protein primary structure is the linear sequence of amino acids in a peptide or protein. By convention, the primary structure of a protein is reported starting from the amino-terminal (N) end to the carboxyl-terminal (C) end. Protein biosynthes ...

information. Prior to that, the foundation compiled the first comprehensive collection of macromolecular sequences in the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, published from 1964 to 1974 under the editorship of

Margaret Dayhoff Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff (March 11, 1925 – February 5, 1983) was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochem ...

. Dayhoff and her research group pioneered in the development of computer methods for the comparison of protein sequences, for the detection of distantly related sequences and duplications within sequences, and for the inference of evolutionary histories from alignments of protein sequences. Winona Barker and

Robert Ledley Robert Steven Ledley (June 28, 1926 – July 24, 2012), professor of physiology and biophysics and professor of radiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, pioneered the use of electronic digital computers in biology and medicine. In ...

assumed leadership of the project after the death of Dayhoff in 1983. In 1999, Cathy H. Wu joined the National Biomedical Research Foundation, and later on Georgetown University Medical Center, to head the bioinformatics efforts of PIR, and has served first as Principal Investigator and, since 2001, as Director. For four decades, PIR has provided many protein databases and analysis tools freely accessible to the scientific community, including the Protein Sequence Database, the first international database (see PIR-International), which grew out of Atlas of Protein Sequences and Structure. In 2002, PIR – along with its international partners, the

European Bioinformatics Institute The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the Well ...

and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics – were awarded a grant from NIH to create

UniProt UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from ...

, a single worldwide database of protein sequence and function, by unifying the Protein Information Resource-Protein Sequence Database,

Swiss-Prot UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from ...

, and

TrEMBL UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from ...

databases. , PIR offers a wide variety of resources mainly oriented to assist the propagation and standardization of protein annotation: PIRSF, iProClass, and iProLINK. The Protein Ontology is another popular database released by the Protein Information Resource.

References

{{Bioinformatics Biological databases Genomics Molecular biology Proteins Proteomics organizations