C12 Entrez Probe - a resource for nucleic acid reagents used in genomics

Date: Sunday, January 15, 2012
Time: 4:50 PM
Room: California
Brian Smith-White , NCBI/NLM/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Michael Baxter , NCBI/NLM/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Svetlana Iazvovskaia , NCBI/NLM/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Anjana Raina , NCBI/NLM/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Kirill Rotmistrovsky , NCBI/NLM/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Ilene Mizrachi , NCBI/NLM/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Tatiana Tatusova , NCBI/NLM/NIH, Bethesda, MD
Entrez Probe is a public registry of nucleic acid reagents that have been used in genomic science for tasks such as genotyping, single-nucleotide polymorphism discovery, analysis of gene expression, gene silencing and resequencing. The data is organized/indexed by numerous criteria such as probe distributor, project that used the probe, and technique. Currently there are over 11,000,000 Probe records. Information for Probe records is collected from 1) peer-reviewed literature of probe development, 2) commercial distributors, and 3) genetic maps gathered from publications and/or organism databases. The records are curated manually and computationally. Computational curation involves determining the uniqueness of the reagent and the location of the primers in orthologs and paralogs by e-PCR. The latter effort allows introduction of the expected product size into the record. Manual curation involves determining the original name of a reagent (deconstructing decades of lab jargon) and associating with a reagent as many databases records from other databases, such as PubMed, GenBank, Map Viewer, or dbSNP, as possible.