Plant Tissue Cult. 11(2): 195-208, 2001 (December)

News and Views

Internet Resources for Molecular Biology : A Primer for Scientists from Least Developed Countries

Hemayet Ullah, Gregory Clark¹ and A. S. Islam¹

Biology Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
E-maill: ullah@email.unc.edu

Key words:

Abastract

Never before in the history of mankind, has so much scientific information been compiled, collated, annotated and above all made available to the general public through the Internet. The exponential growth characterizing the steep rise in the volume of such information as seen in the last few years has been illustrated in Fig. 1. One such source of information is PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Entrez), which covers citations of almost all biological and Medical sciences with links directly to online articles. PubMed allows one, without any cost, access to nearly 11 million such citations. The variety of available literature via the Internet represent several facets of biological science such as (a) 11 million titles with abstracts of all important articles published in international journals, (b) the DNA- and protein sequences deposited to GenBank or the EMBL database, (c) the maps of more than 30,000 human genes (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genemap99), and (d) ~16300 different kinds of 3-dimensional protein structures (http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/) in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). In less than three years, the PDB has registered more than a twofold-increase in the number of protein structures, from ~7500 to ~16300.

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