Abstract

This paper describes the design and applications of Unison, a comprehensive and integrated warehouse of protein sequences, diverse precomputed predictions, and other biological data. Unison provides a practical solution to the burden of preparing data for computational discovery projects, enables holistic feature-based mining queries regarding protein composition and functions, and provides a foundation for the development of new tools. Unison is available for immediate use online via direct database connections and a web interface. In addition, the database schema, command line tools, web interface, and non-proprietary precomputed predictions are released under the Academic Free License and available for download at http://unison-db.org/. This project has resulted in a system that significantly reduces several practical impediments to the initiation of computational biology discovery projects.