If you’re actively engaged in genetic research, you surely know of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a Division of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine. If you’re not familiar with NCBI, I suggest going to their site right now. Get a cup of coffee and set aside some time. You won’t be disappointed.

NCBI maintains several genetics databases, including the world’s largest repository of DNA sequencing data. In 2005, in collaboration with GenBank (Bethesda, Maryland USA), European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-Bank in Hinxton, UK), and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (Mishima, Japan), the DNA sequence database topped 100 gigabases (100,000,000,000).

The site also has a set of map viewers that allow readers to compare physical chromosome maps with linkage and sequencing maps.

But for me, your basic general internist, the best feature of the site are its primers on pharmacogenomics and on Clinically important genetic diseases. I was also pleased to see that this site repeats the mantra of this blog: with respect to medications, one size does not fit all!

Here the introduction to their pharmacogenetics page:

Right now, in doctors’ offices all over the world, patients are given medications that either don’t work or have bad side effects. Often, a patient must return to their doctor over and over again until the doctor can find a drug that is right for them. Pharmacogenomics offers a very appealing alternative. Imagine a day when you go into your doctor’s office and, after a simple and rapid test of your DNA, your doctor changes her/his mind about a drug considered for you because your genetic test indicates that you could suffer a severe negative reaction to the medication. However, upon further examination of your test results, your doctor finds that you would benefit greatly from a new drug on the market, and that there would be little likelihood that you would react negatively to it. A day like this will be coming to your doctor’s office soon, brought to you by pharmacogenomics.

Technorati Tags: DNA databases, pharmacogenetics, pharmacogenomics, genetic diseases

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