Introducing the UniProt Feature Viewer

UniProt provides sequence annotations, a.k.a. protein features, to describe regions or sites of biological interest; secondary structure regions, domains, post-translational modifications and binding sites among others, which play a critical role in the understanding of what the protein does. With the growth in biological data, integration and visualization becomes increasingly important for exposing different data aspects.

Hence we are introducing the UniProt feature viewer, a BioJS component bringing together protein sequence features in one compact view. If you would like to include the feature viewer in your own website, you can find instructions in our technical documentation.

UniProtKB entry display options

The UniProt feature viewer is available for every UniProtKB protein entry through the ‘Feature viewer’ link under the ‘Display’ heading on the left hand side.

You can click on the links under 'Display' to switch your view between the default entry, the feature viewer or the feature table. The feature viewer shows all sequence features from the entry in an interactive view. It also includes additional features such as variants mapped from Large Scale Studies. The feature table shows all sequence features from only the entry in a tabular format.  

Feature viewer

Similar to genome browsers, the viewer uses tracks to display different protein features providing an intuitive picture of co-localized elements. Each track can be expanded to reveal a more in-depth view of the underlying data. 

Clicking on a feature will trigger a pop-up with more information about the feature such as the feature position, description and any available evidence.

You can zoom into an area by dragging the edges of the ruler. You can then grab the ruler and move it along the sequence to scroll.

You can zoom in straight to the amino acid level by using the zoom icon to the left of the ruler.

You can customize your view to hide or show feature tracks using the settings icon to the left of the ruler.

The Variants track offers a novel visualization and presents UniProt curated natural variants along with imported variants from large-scale studies (such as 1000 Genomes, COSMIC, ExAC and ESP). The track shows all amino acids listed vertically. It plots variants at the position on the x-axis and the amino acid substitution on the y-axis. You can use filters on the left to refine your view.

We hope that the feature viewer will make it easier for you to view, compare and analyze sequence feature in one view. 

Would you like to see more features added to the view or have a request that will make the feature viewer more useful for you? 

Send us your feedback at help@uniprot.org!