Web links on the Genomics web site are organized by chapter, with a brief description of each link. The most generally useful links are those listed for the introductory Chapter 1 (see below). The next few paragraphs are intended to provide users with some information on how the Web Links for Genomics were selected and how you might use them to enhance your study of the field of genomics.

High-speed computers and efficient bioinformatics algorithms made genome sequencing possible. The Internet has made dissemination of the resulting data almost effortless. The web links provided here are representative samples of Internet resources covering topics presented in each of the book chapters in Genomics.

Web sites were chosen on the basis of their credibility, informative value, importance to the genomics community, and ease of navigability. Web sites representing significant players in the genomics community were not included if they offered only research summaries and contact information. In other cases, web sites maintained by dedicated individuals, rather than institutions, were included because of their informative value.

The web links provided can be fit into the categories of bibliographies, tutorials, databases, and software tools. Bibliographic links provide reviewed lists of papers representing the “classics” in a particular field. Tutorials are straightforward easy-to-understand primers on conceptually difficult topics (e.g. hidden Markov models) that may have been covered only briefly in the book. Databases provide access to various freely available repositories of genomics data. Lastly, the software tools links contain free software that can be used to process genomics data.

Perhaps the best aspect of the Internet-based genomics databases and tools is that they allow anyone with sufficient interest and motivation to probe the secrets of the genome, which only a decade ago would have been impossible. We encourage students and others to download data from their favorite genomics database and analyze it with freely available software tools, or better yet to write their own.

The links listed here a kind of "greatest hits" of genomics web sites. In most cases, they are umbrella sites that encompass many links and web pages to areas of more focused interest.

The NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) was "established in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information. NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information." Among the many resources on this web site are Entrez, a cross-database search engine, PubMed, a search engine for biomedical research papers, and BLAST, a sequence similarity search engine.

Like the NCBI web site, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) provides numerous internal links to bioinformatics tools, sequence databases, bibliographic databases, and much more. EBI is non-profit academic institution that is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

GenomeNet is part of the Bioinformatics Center at Kyoto University in Japan. This web portal contains many links to sequence databases and bioinformatics tools, some of which may not be included on the NCBI and EBI sites. For example, GenomeNet is home to the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), a comprehensive database of genes, protein function, metabolic pathways, and regulatory pathways. The aim of KEGG is to provide a framework for the complete simulation of a single cell, and perhaps someday an entire organism.

Biome is a searchable database of high-quality, hand-picked Internet resources of interest to researchers in the life and health sciences. Topics range from agriculture and forestry to medicine. The site is maintained by the University of Nottingham Greenfield Medical Library in collaboration with other organizations.

Visiting the Genome News Network of the Center for the Advancement of Genomics is a good way to stay abreast of new developments in genomics. The web site provides free genomics news stories and a tally of all the genomes sequenced to date. Also, included are a glossary of genomics terms and a library of bioethics publications.

Wikipedia is a "free-content" encyclopedia containing hundreds of thousands of articles. While Wikipedia does not focus exclusively on genomics, the articles dealing with genomics and bioinformatics are scholarly and remarkably well written. It is a great place to start in the exploration of difficult topics in science and mathematics, or anything else for that matter.