BLAST: a more efficient report with usability improvements.

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) website at the National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) is an important resource for searching and aligning sequences. A new BLAST report allows faster loading of alignments, adds navigation aids, allows easy downloading of subject sequences and reports and has improved usability. Here, we describe these improvements to the BLAST report, discuss design decisions, describe other improvements to the search page and database documentation and outline plans for future development.

Education resources of the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) hosts 39 literature and molecular biology databases containing almost half a billion records. As the complexity of these data and associated resources and tools continues to expand, so does the need for educational resources to help investigators, clinicians, information specialists and the general public make use of the wealth of public data available at the NCBI. This review describes the educational resources available at NCBI via the NCBI Education page (www.

SemCat: semantically categorized entities for genomics.

We describe the construction of a semantic database called SemCat consisting of a large number of semantically categorized names relevant to genomics. SemCat can be used to facilitate natural language processing in MEDLINE. We present suitable application areas including biomedical name classification and named entity recognition.

GENETAG: a tagged corpus for gene/protein named entity recognition.

Background: Named entity recognition (NER) is an important first step for text mining the biomedical literature. Evaluating the performance of biomedical NER systems is impossible without a standardized test corpus. The annotation of such a corpus for gene/protein name NER is a difficult process due to the complexity of gene/protein names.