Release 1.0 of Ensembl is now available at www.ensembl.org.
Improvements over previous releases include a new web user interface, comprehensive “How To” documents, and a rewritten view of the human genome that allows per-user configuration.
The database now offers 24,046 confirmed genes, and 90 percent of known genes are correctly mapped to the genome.
The Ensembl developers at the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Sanger Center expect to offer several other features within two weeks, including a comparison of mouse whole genome shotgun data to the human genome assembly and clustering of all vertebrate protein sequences to provide potential gene family groups.
Structural Bioinformatics of San Diego has doubled the number of protein families in its ProMax protein structure database to over 400.
The ProMax database is a repository for computationally derived 3D protein structures for which no X-ray crystal structures are available. The protein families contained in the database include proteins believed to be associated with major diseases including asthma, cancer, diabetes, inflammatory diseases, and bacterial and viral infection.