User fee for protein database

Plagued by a funding crunch and inundated with new data, SWISS-PROT, a widely used amino acid database, will soon start charging a fee to industrial users. SWISS-PROT contains sequences and other information on more than 70,000 proteins and is used by some 200,000 researchers in 100 countries, according to its developer, Amos Bairoch of the University of Geneva. But managers have a back-log of about 150,000 computer-generated sequences from which to winnow out protein information, and the database's $3 million-a-year budget is only half of what it needs, he says.