November 1, 2006 (Vol. 26, No. 19)
URL:
http://www.cmbi.ru.nl/geneseeker/
Rating:
Strong Points: Search options
Weak Points: Overwhelming in some senses
Summary:
Let’s say you’re looking for a gene and you have a lot of search criteria and know that the gene could be located in one or more of several popular databases. How do you locate it? One powerful method is to employ the services of GeneSeeker. With an opening page that offers visitors an almost bewildering set of search options, it’s hard to imagine one could want more choices for a search. I actually thought it provided too many options, overwhelming users with genetic locations, malformation descriptions, expression location, excluded genes, and more. Databases searched include OMIM, Medline, SwissProt, Trembl/UniProt, Tbase, and others. The bottom line here is that the more information there is, the more important selective criteria become for increasing the signal-to-noise in searches.
