CONNECT@Library

No. 2
February 27, 2001

Public Access to Human Genome

The DNA sequence of the Human Genome is now freely accessible to all, for public or private use, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The Center is a part of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The completion of a "working draft" of the human genome was announced last June at a press conference at the White House and published in the February 15, 2001 issue of Nature.

The web address for the Human Genome home page is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/guide/human

NCBI's Web site serves as an integrated, one-stop, genomic resource for biomedical researchers around the world. Using search and analysis tools developed at NCBI, scientists can:

Find a gene's location in the genome
Find other genes in the same region
Correlate many diseases to genes
Find out if a similar gene exists in another organism
See genetic variations

The Human Genome data can be downloaded in its entirety, chromosome by chromosome, in segments referred to as "contigs" (for "contiguous sequence"). This data, along with information about the location of genes and other biological features associated with the sequence, is available from NCBI's public FTP site.