http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/RR/

The US National Library of Medicine has recently added Florence Rena Sabin to its Profiles in Science series. Users will find digitized versions of documents, monographs, photographs, and other records of Sabin's "excellent and innovative work on the origins of the lymphatic system, blood cells, and immune system cells, and on the pathology of tuberculosis." The Sabin collection is offered free of charge to any user. [RS]

http://megasun.bch.umontreal.ca/gobase/

GOBASE is "a taxonomically broad organelle genome database that organizes and integrates diverse data related to organelles." Provided by the University of Montreal, GOBASE focuses on mitochondria and chloroplasts, although future versions will cover the bacterial ancestors of these organelles as well. The GOBASE Web site contains separate easy-to-use search engines for mitochondrial and chloroplast data, as well as a helpful user's guide. [RS]

http://www.socgenmicrobiol.org.uk/ijsbmain.htm

The homepage of the Society for General Microbiology (SGM) is worth a visit just for its great design, as one might expect from an organization created "to advance the art and science of microbiology." Readers will also find loads of information about SGM, Europe's largest microbiological society, including its history and current scope. The site also provides the latest microbiology-related news, tons of Web links, and in-depth coverage of such microbiology hot topics as SARS and biological weapons. [RS]

http://www.cbil.upenn.edu/EPConDB/

EPConDB (version 3.1 released 7/31/2003) offers researchers a quick and easy way to find information about pancreatic genes. Provided by the Computational Biology and Informatics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, EPConDB pulls together data from a number of sources, including the mouse and human gene libraries created by the Endocrine Pancreas Consortium. First time users should be happy to note that the Web site includes a set of detailed tutorials for help in querying the database. [RS]

http://aso.org.uk/

This Web site is the homepage of the UK-based Association for the Study of Obesity (ASO), which "promotes research into the causes, prevention, and treatment of obesity" and works toward reducing the frequency of obesity in the general population. The site offers ASO-related news, as well as conference announcements and abstract of papers from past meetings. A page of links conveniently compiles obesity-related Web resources, such as links to other organizations, and recent reports. [RS]

http://colibase.bham.ac.uk/

The University of Birmingham (UK) presents coli BASE, an online resource for comparing the genomes of E. coli (5 strains), Salmonella (3 strains), and Shigella (1 strain), plus several plasmid sequences. The current version of coli BASE draws from Swissprot and GenBank, but future versions will incorporate data from novel analyses. Using coli BASE is quite straightforward -- type in a gene name, coli BASE number, or key word and the search engine will return a list of genes matching the query. [RS]

http://www.medilexicon.com/

UK-based MediLexicon "has the world's online database of pharmaceutical and medical abbreviations -- over 70,000 and growing." Visitors are welcome to this free resource to quickly and easily find definitions for acronyms and abbreviations in the fields of medicine, pharmacy, biotechnology, and more. The Web site also offers the latest medical news (updated daily), which readers may choose to receive as an email newsletter every two weeks. Users are encouraged to send in any corrections or missed acronyms and abbreviations. [RS]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/RefSeq/

The National Center for Biotechnology Information presents the first full release of all NCBI Reference Sequence (RefSeq) records. RefSeq "aims to provide a comprehensive, integrated, non-redundant set of sequences, including genomic DNA, transcript (RNA), and protein products for major research organisms." The database currently includes over 785,000 proteins from numerous organisms, and additional records will be added as they become publicly available. [RS]