In article <Lys-030594105953 at 128.220.56.197>, Lys at jhuigf.bitnet (Lys
Guilbride) wrote:
> Anyone who has idea about ENTREZ, please send information to me.
> I would like to know what it does and how I could obtain a copy of the
> program...
I thought other folks might be interested in this too so I'm posting my
reply.
We've been using entrez for a couple of years now and LOVE it. Basically,
entrez is a database of sequences and their related references. All of the
linkages in the database are already established, so your computer doesn't
have to go chugging through the whole thing every time you go looking for a
paper. You can use it to search protein or nucleotide sequence databases
for an entry (not for sequence alignments a la blast or fasta) or a subset
of the medline database. It has some neat features like "neighboring"
(finding papers related to the selected paper) and "lookup" (find the
reference for this sequence and show me the abstract or vice versa).
Entrez is available in two ways: on CD-ROM from the U. S. Government
Printing Office (about $72/year for 6 sets of 2 CD's-cheaper than cutouts
at a record store!) or over the internet as "network entrez". Network
entrez is a front end that connects with a server at NCBI (sort of like
gopher, for those familiar with it) which is where the database is located.
It's free and you don't need a CD drive. For information on how to get
it, try contacting entrez at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov or call (301) 496-2475. One
advantage that the CD version has, though: MacVector (and possibly other
sequence analysis programs) can "browse" this database and retrieve
sequences as MacVector files all ready to play with. This doesn't work
with the network version.
In summary, It's a pretty good program at a great price!
