Parasitic infections cause a major global burden in terms of human health whilst also affecting livestock and agriculture. Understanding their biology is essential to identify potential candidates for drug and vaccine development. To support the scientific community in this effort, the UniProt knowledgebase (UniProtKB) provides a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and functional information for a wide range of species including parasites and, their hosts and vectors.

This webinar, part of a series covering various aspects of UniProt, will give you an overview on what type of functional information we provide and how to search and retrieve it. We will also describe the curation process, including how we annotate sequence polymorphism, the interaction between host and parasite proteins, and how we highlight the potential biotechnological use of a protein. To illustrate these various aspects, we will use the parasite P. falciparum, the causative agent of malaria, as an example.