About Expasy

Expasy is the bioinformatics resource portal of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (more about its history).

It is an extensible and integrative portal which provides access to over 160 databases and software tools, developed by SIB Groups and supporting a range of life science and clinical research domains, from genomics, proteomics and structural biology, to evolution and phylogeny, systems biology and medical chemistry.

The Expasy search engine

Thanks to a user-friendly search engine, Expasy allows you to seamlessly 1) query in parallel a subset of SIB databases through a single search, and to 2) surface related information and knowledge from the complete set of >160 resources on the portal. Expasy provides information that is automatically aligned with the most recent release of each resources, thereby ensuring up-to-date information.

The terms used in Expasy are based on the EDAM ontology (Black et al., F1000Research., 2022; DOI: 10.7490/f1000research.1118900.1)

Contact

Please contact the Expasy Helpdesk if you experience any issues – or simply to let us know what a difference the portal made for your purpose!

Credit

We do hope your use of Expasy helped you in your research or educational activities!

Séverine Duvaud, Chiara Gabella, Frédérique Lisacek, Heinz Stockinger, Vassilios Ioannidis, Christine Durinx; Expasy, the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal, as designed by its users
Nucleic Acids Research, 2021. DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkab225

Some history

Expasy was created in August 1993 - the dawn of the internet era. At that time, it was referred to as 'ExPASy, the Expert Protein Analysis System' as proteins were its primary focus. It was the first life science website - and among the 150 very first websites in the world!

In June 2011, it became the SIB Expasy Bioformatics Resources Portal: a diverse catalogue of bioinformatics resources developed by SIB Groups.

The current version of Expasy was released in October 2020 following a massive user study and taking into account design, user experience and architecture aspects: we thank all participants for their help in shaping Expasy 3.0!