If you are working on or are interested in human ageing, you should know about the Human Ageing Genomics Resources (HAGR): a web resource that brings together databases and computational tools to help understand the biology of ageing.
The resource started in 2002 as a collaborative project at the University of Namur, Belgium. A searchable and browsable database of genes that are related to human ageing, GenAge, forms the core of the resource. Each gene page contains nomenclature, cytogenetic and protein information. Among other useful features are links to relevant publications and a list of orthologues with links to NCBI Entrez. There are also further external links to OMIM, Swiss-Prot and GeneCard, to name but a few.
Another database, AnAge, caters for those who work on ageing in other species. It has information on ageing in Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, red and purple sea urchin, and 2,469 chordate species!
But databases are not all the HAGR has to offer: there is also the Ageing Research Computational Tool — ARCT. This Perl-based toolkit allows you to generate phylogenetic profiles locally or through NCBI's BLAST, to data-mine multiple sequences to find regulatory or functionally important regions, to display protein–protein interactions and phylogenetic trees, and to access other data-analysis programs such as ClustalW and Gibbs.
The project team is busy making continuous improvements to HAGR. For example, the inclusion of gene-expression information is on the cards. The team plan to include genes that are differently expressed between young and old tissues, focusing mainly on microarray data.
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Skipper, M. Human Ageing Genomics Resources. Nat Rev Genet 5, 330 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1362
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1362
