A practical guide to orient yourself in the labyrinth of genome databases

The identification of genes involved in human inherited disorders has been revolutionized by the resources produced by the Human Genome Project, In particular, the generation of >1 000 000 human expressed sequence tags (ESTs) has led to the partial identification of a significant percentage of all human genes. In the next 7 years, we will witness another revolution when sequencing of the human genome is complete. The generation of large amounts of genomic data must be accompanied by parallel efforts to make the information easily accessible. Efforts towards this goal have already started, but retrieval of information from genomic databases still remains an arduous task, With practical examples, we will try to show how the currently available information can be exploited usefully, in particular to identify candidate genes for human diseases.