UniProt Protein Database Scraper

What it does

This actor scrapes protein records from the UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) API. It searches for proteins by name, gene, organism, or keyword and retrieves detailed protein information including accession numbers, protein names, organism data, gene names, and sequence lengths. The actor uses cursor-based pagination via the Link response header to efficiently traverse large result sets.

Why use this actor

This actor provides a simple, reliable, and scalable way to extract data from public APIs without needing to write any code or manage infrastructure. It handles pagination, rate limiting, error recovery, and data normalization automatically. Whether you are a researcher, analyst, or developer, this actor saves you hours of manual data collection work. The structured JSON output integrates seamlessly with spreadsheets, databases, dashboards, and downstream data pipelines. Run it on Apify platform for automatic scheduling, monitoring, and proxy management.

Input parameters

• searchQuery (string, required): Protein name, gene, or keyword to search. Default: "insulin".
• maxResults (integer, optional): Maximum number of protein records to return. Range: 1-1000. Default: 100.

Output data

The actor outputs a dataset with the following fields:

• accession: UniProt primary accession number
• entryName: UniProt entry name (mnemonic ID)
• proteinName: Recommended full protein name
• organism: Scientific name of the source organism
• geneName: Primary gene name
• sequenceLength: Length of the protein sequence
• entryType: Entry type (Swiss-Prot reviewed or TrEMBL unreviewed)

Each record is validated and null-checked before being pushed to the dataset. Missing or unavailable fields are set to null rather than being omitted, ensuring consistent schema across all records.

Example output

[
    {
        "accession": "P01308",
        "entryName": "INS_HUMAN",
        "proteinName": "Insulin",
        "organism": "Homo sapiens",
        "geneName": "INS",
        "sequenceLength": 110,
        "entryType": "UniProtKB reviewed (Swiss-Prot)"
    }
]

Pricing

This actor is priced based on usage:

• $0.01 per result returned in the dataset
• $0.005 per actor start (flat fee per run)

These costs cover Apify platform compute and proxy resources. For large-scale scraping jobs, consider using the maxResults parameter to control costs and stay within your budget. Typical runs of 100 results cost approximately $1.01.

More scrapers from brave_paradise

Check out other actors published by brave_paradise on the Apify Store for more data extraction tools covering scientific databases, developer communities, news aggregators, and government open-data APIs. All actors follow the same high-quality patterns with robust error handling, automatic pagination, and clean structured output.