NCBI

Part I. The back story from the genome record Together, these five posts describe the discovery of a novel paramyxovirus in the Aedes aegyptii genome and a new method for finding interesting anomalies in GenBank. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out? III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink. IV. ... Read more

Instead of enjoying a sunny summer day today, or partying with SciBlings in New York, I'm staring out my window watching the rain. Inspiration hit! What about searching for August? Folks, meet the HFQ protein from E. coli. I found this lovely molecule by doing a multi-database search at the NCBI with the term 'August'. HFQ is a lovely protein with ... Read more

or is it just an idea that's ahead of the curve? Last week, I was stunned to discover at least 31 papers in an NCBI Gene database entry that were in the entry for the wrong gene. I wrote about this here, here, here, and ... Read more

It's pretty common these days to pick up an issue of Science or Nature and see people ranting about GenBank (1). Many of the rants are triggered, at least in part, by a wide-spread misunderstanding of what GenBank is and how it works. Perhaps this can be solved through education, but I don't think that's likely. People from the NCBI can explain over and over again that some of the sequence databases in GenBank are meant to be an archival resource (2), and define the term "archive," but that's not going to help. Confusion about database content and oversight is widespread in this ... Read more

In a recent post, I wrote about an article that I read in Science magazine on the genetics of learning. One of things about the article that surprised me quite a bit was a mistake the authors made in placing the polymorphism in the wrong gene. I wrote about that yesterday. The other thing that surprised me was something that I found at the ... Read more