Washington

GenBank, the leading human genome database, is about to undergo a facelift.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Maryland, will relaunch GenBank next month in a form that will be easier for users to navigate and will include a wealth of new ‘annotation’, such as information on genetic markers and gene and protein functions.

Users will be able to click on part of an onscreen chromosome and retrieve information such as the predicted function of a partially sequenced gene.

Until now, this information has only been available for chromosome regions for which a contiguous DNA sequence is available. Much of this annotation will be generated automatically by computer algorithms.

Users will also be able to navigate more easily from various genetic markers in the database, such as sequence tagged sites and expressed sequence tags. And they will find it easier to zoom in and out on specific chromosome regions, says David Lipman, director of the NCBI.

The new GenBank will also allow more links with the database of single nucleotide polymorphisms. This separate public database details the subtle variations in sequence found between individuals for certain genes.