Protein Information Resource

The Protein Information Resource (PIR), located at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC), is an integrated public bioinformatics resource to support genomic and proteomic research, and scientific studies.

History
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 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.

Dr. Winona Barker and Dr. Robert Ledley assumed leadership of the project after the untimely death of Dr. Dayhoff in 1983. In 1999, Dr. Cathy H. Wu joined NBRF, and later on GUMC, to head the bioinformatics efforts of PIR, and has served first as Principal Investigator and, since 2001, as Director.

For four decades, PIR has provided many protein databases and analysis tools freely accessible to the scientific community, including the Protein Sequence Database (PSD), the first international database (see PIR-International), which grew out of Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure.

In 2002, PIR along with its international partners, EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) and SIB (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics), were awarded a grant from NIH to create UniProt, a single worldwide database of protein sequence and function, by unifying the PIR-PSD, Swiss-Prot, and TrEMBL databases.

Present
Today, PIR offers a wide variety of resources mainly oriented to assist the propagation and standardization of protein annotation: PIRSF, iProClass, iProLINK

Reference

 * Wu CH, Yeh LS, Huang H, Arminski L, Castro-Alvear J, Chen Y, Hu Z, Kourtesis P, Ledley RS, Suzek BE, Vinayaka CR, Zhang J, Barker WC (2003). "The Protein Information Resource". Nucleic Acids Res 31(1):345-7.