On December 18th, 2019
Historically, the lines of the UniProtKB text format have been wrapped at 75 characters for technical reasons (terminal screen size and data processing capabilities). When these technical restrictions vanished, we introduced exceptions for data like URLs, protein names and cross-references where line wrapping does not improve readability. These lines can be up to 255 characters long, but most lines are still wrapped at 75 characters for readability. We are now going to increase the maximum number of characters for wrapped lines to 80 in the context of the format change of the FT section of the UniProtKB text format for the functional annotation of different gene products in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot.
Other planned changes for UniProt can be found at https://www.uniprot.org/changes. Please don't hesitate to contact the UniProt helpdesk in case of questions.
