Concern about supplying sufficient food for the Earth's population has concerned humankind since antiquity, and has been the focus of commentary from such notables as Thomas Malthus and countless others. Most recently, there has been growing concern about the so-called "Gene Revolution", in which "genetically modified (GM) crops are tailored to address chronic agricultural problems in certain...

The genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague or "Black Death," has been sequenced by a team of scientists at the UK-based Sanger Centre with funding from the Wellcome Trust. Completion of the Yersinia pestis sequencing will hopefully allow researchers to develop more drugs to combat the disease that is still prevalent in some parts of the world and can cause death after just...

Created by the Jackson Laboratory as part of Mouse Genome Informatics, this website features Mammalian Orthology and Comparative Maps. At this site, searches can be made in the area of Mammalian Orthology by species, gene symbol, name, or map position. Site visitors can also build comparative maps, retrieve an Oxford Grid to display a two-species orthology comparison, and view orthologies between...

This collection of Web sites about twins and twin biology starts with a short feature from The Straight Dope (1), which explains the phenomenon of superfecundation. Next is a more extensive piece from Scientific American (2), offering an interesting look at the role genetics may play in the chance of having fraternal twins. The following Web site contains a brief MSNBC story on the recent findings...

Created by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, UniGene is "an experimental system for automatically partitioning GenBank sequences into a non-redundant set of gene-oriented clusters." In addition to gene sequences, this Web site also offers thousands of novel expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences, a useful gene discovery resource. Organisms currently cataloged include human, rat,...

Supported by the University of Otago, the Health Research Council, and the Royal Society of New Zealand, Transterm is "an interactive database providing access to RNA sequences and their associated motifs. The RNA sequences are derived from all gene sequence data in Genbank, including complete genomes, divided into putative 5' and 3' UTRs, initiation and termination regions and the full CDS...