Museums have their curators. Art galleries too. Their job is to look after collections they are knowledgeable about and present them to an audience in a way that makes sense and is informative. Biocurators do the same. Ever since the advent of computers and advanced technology in the life sciences, the quantity of biological data has grown exponentially and been stored in databases. The simple piling up of data, however, is of little help not only to researchers but also to computers. To be useful, they need to be sorted some way or another. Such a step is easily performed by specialized software. But as for many things, without a human touch something lacks. Swiss-Prot is a protein sequence database that sprung into existence 30 years ago when protein sequences were still trickling in. In those days, every sequence could be nursed. Today, however, millions of protein sequences are produced on a monthly basis. How does Swiss-Prot cope? Thanks to its biocurators.
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