Information at Your Fingertips

The National Center for Biotechnology Information has launched dbVar, a database of genomic structural variations, says the National Institutes of Health. The database, found here, includes information about large-scale DNA variations found in healthy people as well as those with certain conditions, including autism and cancer. dbVar is part of an international collaboration that includes the new European Bioinformatics Institute's Database of Genomic Variants archive, orDGVa, and Toronto's Database of Genomic Variants, or DGV. A letter in this month's Nature Genetics from Deanna Church and her colleagues introducing dbVar and DGVa says that "the explosion of data from diverse structural variation studies now necessitates the development of a public data archive" and that "through these efforts, the structural variation archives promise to greatly assist all studies of genetic variation."