Bioinformatics glossary - U

Unidentified reading frame (URF)

An open reading frame encoding a protein of undefined function .

UCSC genome browser

A multi-species genome browser housed at University of California, Santa Cruz. http://genome.ucsc.edu/

Upstream

Toward the 5' end of a single stranded lenth of DNA or gene of interest.

UTR

Untranslated region; a segment of DNA (or RNA) which is transcribed and present in the mature mRNA, but not translated into protein. UTRs may occur at either or both the 5' and 3' ends of a gene or transcript.

UniChem

UniChem is a simple, large-scale, non-redundant database of pointers between chemical structure identifiers. Its purpose is to optimise the efficiency with which structure-based hyperlinks are built and maintained between chemistry-based resources.

UniProt

UniProt – Universal Protein Resource: The world's most comprehensive catalogue of information on proteins and a central repository of protein sequence and function, created by joining the information contained in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, UniProtKB/TrEMBL, and PIR http://www.ebi.ac.uk/uniprot/

UniParc

UniParc is a non-redundant database of most publicly available protein sequences, wherein each sequence is stored with a unique UniParc Identifier (UPI).

See also http://www.uniprot.org/help/uniparc

UniMES

The UniProt Metagenomic and Environmental Sequences (UniMES) database is a repository specifically developed for metagenomic and environmental data.

UniProt Knowledgebase

The EBI’s the central access point for extensive curated protein information, including function, classification, and cross-references. See www.uniprot.org for more information.

UniProt-GOA

The UniProt-Gene Ontology Annotation database provides high-quality manual and electronic GO annotations to proteins within UniProtKB. UniProt-GOA is the largest and most comprehensive open-source contributor of annotations to the GO Consortium annotation effort.

UniProtKB

UniProtKB (UniProt Knowledgebase) is the central access point for extensive curated protein information, including function, classification, and cross-reference.

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot is a high quality manually annotated and non-redundant protein sequence database, which brings together experimental results, computed features and scientific conclusions. UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot provides annotated entries for many species, but concentrates on the annotation of entries from model organisms of distinct taxonomic groups to ensure the presence of high quality annotation for representative members of all protein families. Together with UniProtKB/TrEMBL, its computer-annotated supplement maintained at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot constitutes the UniProt knowledgebase (UniProtKB).

UniProtKB/TrEMBL

UniProtKB/TrEMBL is a computer-annotated protein sequence database complementing the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot Protein Knowledgebase. UniProtKB/TrEMBL contains the translations of all coding sequences (CDS) present in the EMBL/GenBank/DDBJ Nucleotide Sequence Databases and also protein sequences extracted from the literature or submitted to UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot. The database is enriched with automated classification and annotation.

UniRef

The UniRef databases provide clustered sets of sequences from UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), including splice variants, isoforms and selected UniParc records. This offers a more complete coverage of the protein sequence space while hiding redundant sequences from view. Unlike UniParc, sequence fragments are merged in UniRef.

Uracil

Nitrogenous pyrimidine base found in RNA but not DNA.

USPTO

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or USPTO) is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that provides patent and trademark protection to inventors and businesses for their inventions and corporate and product identification.