The recent UniProt website is fabulous, containing a complete collection of links to different resources. UniProt itself could be a very good resource for data mining for biological information.

I have a few questions regarding the SNP information in UniProt.

1. SNP information could be in two different section: Pathology and Biotech section and Sequence section. Is this from the annotation of disease SNP in dbSNP?
2. I want to identify disease SNP from natural variance. From xml file of UniProt (like: http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/Q96CV9.xml), are all "feature" entries of variant with "evident" key disease related? Which is like following line: `<feature type="sequence variant" description="In GLC1E." id="VAR_021537" evidence="16 17 18">`
3. How does UniProt do the mapping between dbSNP and UniProt? Just by sequence alignment of mRNA? Is the mapping complete and correct? Or there is any heuristic behind.

Thanks
1. The disease kind is explained in http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/humu.22594/full you can read a bit more on the other kind [here][1]
2. This is a bit easier using RDF and sparql http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/Q96CV9.rdf than in the XML format. See [this example][2] to get all natural variants with a xref and involved in disease entry.
3. Hope one of my other colleagues comes round to answer that ;)

 [1]: http://www.uniprot.org/help/variant
 [2]: http://beta.sparql.uniprot.org/sparql?format=html&query=PREFIX+up%3A%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fpurl.uniprot.org%2Fcore%2F%3E+%0D%0APREFIX+taxon%3A%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fpurl.uniprot.org%2Ftaxonomy%2F%3E+%0D%0APREFIX+rdfs%3A%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2F01%2Frdf-schema%23%3E+%0D%0APREFIX+skos%3A%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2004%2F02%2Fskos%2Fcore%23%3E+%0D%0ASELECT+*%0D%0AWHERE%0D%0A%7B%0D%0A%09%3Fprotein+a+up%3AProtein+%3B%0D%0A%09%09up%3Aorganism+taxon%3A9606+%3B%0D%0A%09%09up%3AencodedBy+%3Fgene+%3B%0D%0A%09%09up%3Aannotation+%3FdiseaseAnnotation+%2C%0D%0A++%09%09%09%3FnatvarAnnotation+.%0D%0A++%09%3Fgene+skos%3AprefLabel+%3Fname+.%0D%0A%09%3FdiseaseAnnotation+a+up%3ADisease_Annotation+%3B%0D%0A%09%09rdfs%3Acomment+%3Ftext+.%0D%0A++++%3FnatvarAnnotation+a+up%3ANatural_Variant_Annotation+%3B%0D%0A++++++++rdfs%3AseeAlso+%3Fdbxref+.%0D%0A%7D