Objective: The entire human genome will be sequenced in September 2000. Facing the exponential increase of data in the GenBank at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, reproductive biologists are being bombarded with massive amounts of information on diverse genes. It is becoming increasingly difficult for individual investigators to sort out the diverse genetic and physiologic information on the localization and function of different genes in the ovary. To alleviate the present situation, we have taken advantage of the accessibility of the Internet and initiated a project that serves the entire ovarian research community.
Results and discussion: The Ovarian Kaleidoscope database provides information regarding biologic function, expression pattern, and regulation of genes that are expressed in the ovary. In addition, it serves as a gateway to other online information resources relevant to ovarian research by offering results from original papers and data about nucleotide and amino acid sequences, and human and murine mutation phenotypes. All references are linked by hypertext to PubMed and additional links to sequence databases are also included. This information is accessible online and searchable not only by gene name but also by criteria such as the cellular and ovarian function of the gene product, the expression of genes in different ovarian cell types, or their association with specific ovarian phenotypes.