Online Databases Bring Research to The Desktop

Extract

Most medical researchers once believed that creating large computer databases of known genes or DNA sequences was like “art for art’s sake”—a case of gathering information for the sake of gathering information. Although interesting, it had no immediate relevance to understanding or treating a disease.

But today, as technology has advanced to make data collection faster and far less expensive, online scientific Web sites have thrived. With a few clicks of a computer mouse, scientists now can scroll through vast databases of biological information, allowing them to form hypotheses at their desktops and quickly pursue new discoveries.

In two articles in the March issue of the journal Nature Genetics, scientists from Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif., and the National Cancer Institute collaborated to report a major harvest of new data in the study of cancer.

Using DNA microarray technology, the scientists first recorded the expression patterns of approximately 8,000 biologically interesting genes in 60 distinct tumor cell lines. All of the cell lines currently are used in NCI’s national drug screening program, and they represent a range of common human tumors. The data from this study can be accessed online at http://genome-www.stanford.edu/nci60 and http://discover.nci.nih.gov.