Rapid access to biomedical knowledge with GeneCards and HotMolecBase: implications for the electrophoretic analysis of large sets of gene products.

Rapid access to well-organized information about gene products is important for many studies that simultaneously monitor large sets of those factors, for example with electrophoretic methods. HotMolecBase and GeneCards, Internet resources that may be accessed from our Bioinformatics homepage at http://bioinfo.weizmann.ac.il/, have been designed to address similar problems. GeneCards presents semi-automatically collected information about all approved human genes and their products (with a focus on cellular functions and medical aspects), and offers a new kind of knowledge navigation guidance system that interactively guides the information-seeking scientist to relevant information. On the other hand, HotMolecBase is a collection of more extensive hypertext fact sheets about a small set of medically interesting molecules (mainly proteins) that are regarded as especially promising targets for drug development. Together, both resources may help scientists world-wide to find their way in the growing labyrinth of biomedical information on the World Wide Web. In the present article, we want to explain how these resources may be used by researchers who want to access information related to particular spots on two-dimensional electrophoresis gels.