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The mission of the Protein Information Resource is to
provide:
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An Integrated Public Resource
of Functional Annotation of Protein Data
To Support Genomic/Proteomic Research & Scientific Discovery
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The Protein Information Resource (PIR) for over three decades has been a community
resource that provides protein databases and analysis tools to support research
on molecular evolution, functional genomics, and computational biology.
The PIR was established in 1984 by the National Biomedical Research Foundation
(NBRF)
as a resource to assist researchers in the identification and interpretation
of protein sequence information. Prior to that, the NBRF compiled the first
comprehensive collection of macromolecular sequences in the "Atlas of Protein
Sequence and Structure" published from 1965-1978 under the editorship of
Margaret O. Dayhoff. Dr. 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. The
protein superfamily concept, introduced in 1975, is used to organize the database.
Dr. Winona
Barker and Dr.
Robert Ledley assumed leadership of the project after the untimely death
of Dr. Dayhoff in 1983. The PIR has provided user-friendly database retrieval
software since 1981. In 1992 the original programs, PSQ and NAQ, were replaced
with the ATLAS program, which allows simultaneous access to and retrieval from
multiple macromolecular or textual databases. In 1988, the PIR-International
was established as a collaboration among the NBRF, the Munich Information Center
for Protein Sequences (MIPS), and the Japan International Protein Information
Database (JIPID) to collect and distribute the PIR-International Protein Sequence
Database (PSD) internationally. The PIR also produces several auxiliary databases.
In 1998, Dr. Cathy H. Wu joined NBRF to head the Bioinformatics efforts of
the PIR and has served as the Principal Investigator of the PIR project since
2001. Key developments during this period include: (i) highly-automated sequence
classification and annotation, (ii) enhanced Web site for data mining and analysis,
(iii) a new iProClass database
that integrates family relationships and functional/structural annotations,
(iv) PIR-PSD distribution in XML format, and (v) migration into Oracle object-relational
database.
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