Database Accession Number
Synonyms
Definition
A database accession number, rather like a database identifier, is a short code used to uniquely identify a particular entry or record within a particular database. The code normally contains alphanumeric characters, and is usually designed to be machine readable (they are seldom, if ever, human readable). For example, P02700 is the accession number that identifies the entry for ovine rhodopsin in the UniProtKB:Swiss-Prot (UniProt consortium 2011) protein sequence database: Unlike its largely human-readable database identifier (OPSD_SHEEP), this accession number is neither informative nor particularly memorable to humans.
As already mentioned, accession numbers are database specific, and different databases adopt different numbering conventions. Hence, for example, in the PIR protein sequence database, ovine rhodopsin has the accession number A03155.
Information pertinent to ovine rhodopsin, which belongs to a superfamily of G protein–coupled...
References
- Hunter S, Apweiler R, Attwood TK, Bairoch A, Bateman A et al (2009) InterPro: the integrative protein signature database. Nucleic Acids Res 37(Database issue):D211–D215PubMedCrossRefGoogle Scholar
- UniProt Consortium (2011) Ongoing and future developments at the universal protein resource. Nucleic Acids Res 39(Database issue):D214–D219CrossRefGoogle Scholar