The GeneCards™ family of databases: GeneCards, GeneLoc, GeneNote and GeneAnnot

The popular GeneCards™ integrated database of human genes, genomic maps, proteins and diseases has recently spawned three related functional genomics efforts. As sequence data rapidly accumulates, the bottleneck in biology shifts from data production to analysis; researchers seek a profound understanding of the role of each gene, and of the way genes function together. GeneLoc integrates human gene collections by comparing genomic coordinates at the exon level, eliminating redundancies, and assigning unique and meaningful location-based identifiers. GeneCards expression tissue vectors are provided by GeneNote, the first effort to present sophisticated expression analyses for a variety of normal human tissues using the full complement of gene representations (Affymetrix arrays HG-U95A-E). The GeneAnnot system aligns probe-sets with the major public repositories of human mRNA sequences, and provides detailed annotation for each probe-set, with links to GeneCards.