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Human Genome News, July 1993; 5(2)
Accumulation and analysis of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) have become an important component of genome research. EST data are used to identify gene products; study tissue differentiation, development, and molecular evolution; and accelerate human gene cloning.
dbEST, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) special resource for ESTs, contains more than 20,000 sequences from major model organisms and other species. NCBI accepts direct bulk data submissions, issues GenBank® accession numbers, and receives input via daily updates from Los Alamos National Laboratory, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and DNA Data Base of Japan. Because up to 70% of new ESTs cannot be characterized by homology with known sequences, a special system based on a BLAST function library has been developed for automatic and continual reannotation. This is accomplished by periodic rescreening of all ESTs against general-purpose nucleotide and protein sequence databases.
Submitted information and results of analyses are stored in a relational database and made available to the public in a variety of forms. Data may be searched using the BLAST Internet and e-mail servers, and full reports on ESTs may be obtained from est_report@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (type help in the message body and leave the subject line blank). Sequences from dbEST are also included in a new EST division of GenBank. A FASTA-formatted version of all sequences in dbEST (with descriptive header lines) is available for anonymous ftp from the Data Repository at NCBI (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). Full reports on ESTs also contain information on the availability of physical DNA clones (e.g., American Type Culture Collection numbers and ordering information).
[Mark Boguski, NCBI]
The electronic form of the newsletter may be cited in the following style:
Human Genome Program, U.S. Department of Energy, Human Genome News (v5n2).
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international 13-year effort, 1990 to 2003. Primary goals were to discover the complete set of human genes and make them accessible for further biological study, and determine the complete sequence of DNA bases in the human genome. See Timeline for more HGP history.
Published from 1989 until 2002, this newsletter facilitated HGP communication, helped prevent duplication of research effort, and informed persons interested in genome research.
