The NCBI BioSystems database centralizes and cross-links existing biological systems databases, increasing their utility and target audience by integrating their pathways and systems into NCBI resources. This integration allows users of NCBI's Entrez databases to quickly categorize proteins, genes and small molecules by metabolic pathway, disease state or other BioSystem type.
Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families.
Entrez Gene is NCBI's database for gene-specific information. Entrez Gene maintains records from genomes which have been completely sequenced, which have an active research community to submit gene-specific information, or which are scheduled for intense sequence analysis.
GenBank is a comprehensive database that contains publicly available nucleotide sequences for more than 300,000 organisms named at the genus level or lower, obtained primarily through submissions from individual laboratories and batch submissions from large-scale sequencing projects, including whole genome shotgun (WGS) and environmental sampling projects. Daily data exchange with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Nucleotide Sequence Database in Europe and the DNA Data Bank of Japan ensures worldwide coverage. GenBank is accessible through the NCBI Entrez retrieval system, which integrates data from the major DNA and protein sequence databases along with taxonomy, genome, mapping, protein structure and domain information, and the biomedical journal literature via PubMed. BLAST provides sequence similarity searches of GenBank and other sequence databases.
The Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database stores over 20,000 microarray- and sequence-based functional genomics studies, and continues to handle the majority of direct high-throughput data submissions from the research community. Multiple mechanisms are provided to help users effectively search, browse, download and visualize the data at the level of individual genes or entire studies.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides analysis and retrieval resources for the data in GenBank and other biological data made available through the NCBI web site.
The PubChem BioAssay database is a public repository for biological activities of small molecules and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). It archives experimental descriptions of assays and biological test results. A PubChem BioAssay data entry includes an assay description, a summary and detailed test results. Each assay record is linked to the molecular target, whenever possible, and is cross-referenced to other NCBI database records.
PubChem BioAssay Service expands upon PubChem. It is a set of web servers which provide for rapid data retrieval, integration, and comparison of biological screening results, exploratory structure-activity analysis and target selectivity examination.
It goes to the library. You go to the pub; receive email alerts for current contents of PubMed and GenBank; e.g. use accession number of htg record as query to receive sequence updates (as the version number changes).