While it may not seem like the most enthralling piece of reading, the recently released proposed budget of the United States government for the fiscal year 2005 is an important document. As presented here, visitors may download the entire budget (but it should be noted that it is 63 MB), or elect to view specific sections dealing with various agencies, such as the Department of Agriculture, the...

The Expert Protein Analysis System (ExPASy) is a metasite associated with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. The site focuses on the study and analysis of proteins, and includes a number of databases and analytical tools. A new Reference link provides a helpful description of the resources on the site; users may wish to view this to determine what tools are most useful to them. A number of...

The "folding" in the title of this site refers to the process by which proteins fold themselves before performing various important functions. This process is critical to just about every aspect of biology, yet scientists still don't understand exactly how protein folding works. Additionally, when proteins don't fold correctly, it can lead to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and any number of...

This is the home page of an IBM research and development project that is designing a supercomputer, called Blue Gene/L, capable of 200 trillion floating point operations per second. According to the Web site, this specification "is larger than the total computing power of the top 500 supercomputers in the world today." Working in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IBM...

The New York Structural Biology Center (NYSBC), opened December 12, 2002, houses the "largest and most advanced cluster of high-field research magnets in the United States" for probing the three-dimensional structures of proteins. This Web site offers news, relevant publications, photos of the facility, and other information about NYSBC, a collaborative effort of nine prominent East Cost research...

Created by researchers at MIT's Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR) initiative, this website offers interested parties a 3-D protein viewer that "allows students to learn key concepts about the biology of proteins in an interactive manner." First-time users may want to start by clicking on the "Video Tutorial" on the homepage to get a basic sense of how the viewer works. The site...

SWISS-PROT, provided by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, is a "curated protein sequence database" that provides, with minimal redundancy and "a high level of integration with other databases," descriptions of "the function of a protein, its domains structure, post-translational modifications" and variants, as well as a host of other information. Access to the SWISS-PROT database is available...

While certainly a fantastic educational resource, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) website is definitely geared towards those with a background in or who are currently studying proteins. The site, authored by Eric Martz of the University of Massachusetts, offers several flash-enabled movies that allow viewers to study protein molecules from a three dimensional point of view. As the site...