These FASTA amino acid sequences are compressed into a .gz (gzip) file.
Before using the makeblastdb command, this FASTA file is uncompressed using gunzip, turning uniprot_sprot.fasta.gz into uniprot_sprot.fasta.
Once the FASTA file is downloaded and uncompressed, makeblastdb is used to create a BLAST protein database of the amino acid sequences in this FASTA file.
This BLAST protein database is named swissprot, and consists of three binary files.
Once the BLAST protein database is created, blastp and blastx can be used to search sequences against it.
This database can be selected using the argument -db swissprotwith blastp or blastx (the path to the swissprot database will need to be given if the command is run from a different directory).