An international consortium that maintains several databases serving as a central repository for information about protein sequences and functions. Funded chiefly by the US National Institutes of Health, it is a crucial resource for molecular biologists worldwide. UniProt was established in 2002 to pool the database resources of three organizations: the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), and the Protein Information Resource (PIR) of the US National Biomedical Research Foundation. Hitherto these organizations had separately hosted the databases TrEMBL (translated EMBL), Swiss-Prot, and Protein Sequence Database, respectively. The formation of UniProt enabled these databases to be amalgamated and streamlined to form the basis for the UniProt Knowledgebase and associated databases.