Future vision of the GDB human genome database

In 1973, scientists assembled at the first Human Gene Mapping Workshop to discuss the 64 human genes mapped at that time. In 1989, the GDB Human Genome Database was created to store information on 1, 700 mapped human genes. Ten years later, as the human genome project closes in on the release of the complete DNA sequence holding as many as 100,000 human genes, GDB is evolving to continue to meet the needs of the scientific community. Well known as a resource for data which has been stringently reviewed as part of the curation process, GDB prepares to continue to provide a compilation of the human genome including maps, map objects, polymorphisms, and mutations. As more sites across the Internet are established to share biological information, it becomes increasingly burdensome for the scientist to collect data from all sources of a particular domain. In an attempt to reduce this burden, GDB continues to load data from large genome centres and accept submissions from researchers around the world. Moreover, GDB looks to provide a mechanism to link gene-related information to the human reference sequence. In doing this, GDB plans to establish federated linkages with "boutique" databases around the world that could contain enormous amounts of valuable information about specific genes or chromosomes.