The Biological database reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Biological database

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As of 2004, there are around 500 public and commercial biological databases. These databases contain information about nucleotide sequences of genes or amino acid sequences of proteins. Furthermore information about function, structure, localisation on chromosome, clinical effects of mutations as well as similarities of biological sequences can be found.

Table of contents
1 Overview
2 Most important public databases for molecular biology

Overview

Biological databases have become an important tool in assisting scientists to understand and explain a host of biological phenomena from the structure of biomolecules and their interaction, to the whole metabolism of organisms and to understanding the evolution of species. This knowledge helps facilitate the fight against diseases, assists in the development of medical drugs and in discovering basic relationships amongst species in the history of life

The biological knowledge of databases is usually (locally) distributed amongst many different specialized databases. This makes it difficult to ensure the consistency of information, which sometimes leads to low data quality.

See also: NCBI, PubMed

Most important public databases for molecular biology

(from www.kokocinski.net)

Primary sequence databases

  1. DDBJ (DNA DataBase of Japan)
  2. EMBL Nucleotide DB (European Molecular Biology Laboratory )
  3. GenBank [1] (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

Meta-databases

  1. euGenes (Univ. of Indiana)
  2. GeneCards (Weizmann Inst.)
  3. GenLoc / UDB (Weizmann Inst.)
  4. SOURCE (Univ. of Stanford)

Specialized databases

  1. CGAP Cancer Genes (National Cancer Institute)
  2. Clone Registry Clone Collections (National Center for Biotechnology Information)
  3. DBGET H.sapiens (Univ. of Kyoto)
  4. DIP Interacting Proteins (Univ. of California)
  5. Ensembl Genome BrowserAnnotated Genomes (EMBL-EBI and Sanger Inst.)
  6. GDB (Human Genome Organization)
  7. I.M.A.G.E Clone Collections (Image Consortium)
  8. KEGG Functional Db (Univ. of Kyoto)
  9. LocusLink (National Center for Biotechnology Information)
  10. MGI Mouse Genome (Jackson Lab.)
  11. NCBI-UniGene (National Center for Biotechnology Information)
  12. OMIM Inherited Diseases (National Center for Biotechnology Information)
  13. PEDANT Protein Db (Forschungszentrum f. Umwelt & Gesundheit)
  14. List with SNP-Databases
  15. SWISS-PROT Protein Db (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)

Microarray-databases

  1. ArrayExpress (European Bioinformatic Institute)
  2. Gene Expression Omnibus (National Center for Biotechnology Information)
  3. maxd (Univ. of Manchester)
  4. SMD (Univ. of Stanford)