As 2003 marks the completion of the human genome sequence and the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the DNA double helix, the Internet has exploded with noteworthy Web sites on the topic. The following represent just some of what the Web has to offer. The first site is the homepage of the National Human Genome Research Institute (1) -- a good place to start even if the content and presentation...

Created in 1997, the Office of Public Health Genomics (OPHG) was established "to integrate genomics into public health research, policy, and programs, which could improve interventions designed to prevent and control the country's leading chronic, infectious, environmental, and occupational diseases." Visitors to the site should start by looking over their "Focus Areas", which include "Genomics...

This website features the specialist research groups at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). The EBI's research groups provide "biological data and utilities to aid the scientific community in the understanding of genomic and proteomic data." This site offers a variety of information about numerous research groups including the Computational Genomics Group, Sequence Database Group,...

How do you get young people interested in the world of genomics? Well, for a start, you can take them on this interactive tour of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University. Created by a team of researchers at the Center, this site offers twelve different video clips, several supplemental videos, and a host of student activities. Visitors can get started by viewing the five different...

The Human Ageing Genomic Resources (HAGR)—currently led by Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães at the Harvard Medical School—is "a collection of databases and tools designed to help researchers understand the genetics of human ageing.” Two major searchable resources offered in HAGR are AnAge, a curated animal ageing database with more than 2,000 species; and GenAge, “a curated database of genes related to...

A very comprehensive and well-organized offering from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, VISTA offers "suite of programs and databases for comparative analysis of genomic sequences. There are two ways of using VISTA - you can submit your own sequences and alignments for analysis (VISTA servers) or examine pre-computed whole-genome alignments of different species (VISTA browser)." The site also...

The Microarray Gene Expression Data Society is an international organization composed of computer scientists, data analysts, and biologists "that aims to facilitate the sharing of microarray data generated by functional genomics and proteomics experiments." Hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute, this website connects to information about six major Data Society workgroups (e.g. the...

The August 28, 2003 issue of the journal Nature presented a collection of reports that, "along with other analysis of key components of the ocean's food web, highlights the significance of genome sequences from the sea." This Web Focus provides access to these reports free of charge to any reader. The reports focus particularly on marine phytoplankton. The site also includes links to related...

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine offers the Trace Archive -- "a repository of the raw sequence traces generated by large sequencing projects." The Trace Archive is the sole source of raw sequence data for projects that rely on a Whole Genome Shotgun strategy. Users can search the archive by BLAST or by a number of other query options. The...

Created by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, UniGene is "an experimental system for automatically partitioning GenBank sequences into a non-redundant set of gene-oriented clusters." In addition to gene sequences, this Web site also offers thousands of novel expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences, a useful gene discovery resource. Organisms currently cataloged include human, rat,...