I was intrigued by the headline - Scientists decipher 21,000 genes. It's often hard to know what's been done from such headlines - decipher? Sequence? Analyse?
Anyways, turns out that the Japan Biological Information Research Centre (great name!) have produced an integrated database for 21 037 cDNA clusters with a very wide ranging annotation. It's well worth a look, though I got "server busy" several times. They also have this stupid front page which redirects you after 15 seconds for no apparent reason.
Comments
Usability
Maybe its just me but I find the usability of the majority of online bioinformatics databases to be really poor. The JBIRC database, I'm sure is very comprehensive and technically brilliant but suffers from usability problems (admittedly my usability testing consists of see how long it takes to find my favorite gene SERPINC1 and what kind of information is provided). I wonder what can be done about this ?
Usability is the last thing on any scientists mind, given that most projects are results based and not focused on the end user (other scientists using the resource).