[Introduction to Go! Poly, a human genome polymorphism database]

Databases play an important role in the study of genetic polymorphism. To meet the need for more studies of human genome polymorphism by Chinese medical and pharmaceutical community, a gene oriented human genome polymorphism database-Go! Poly was constructed. As a generalized polymorphism database, Go! Poly extracted human gene-linked sequence variations of all common types from various public resources including scientific journals and Web resources such as HGBASE (http://hgbase.cgr.ki.se) and dbSNP (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/SNP/). The polymorphism data were then categorized into different gene loci, and the reference sequences given by LocusLink were used as positioning reference. To facilitate the use, a friendly web interface and a text based query strategy were implemented. Users can fetch specific polymorphism data in just three steps: find specific gene locus by simple search, display sequence variation information of a specific gene locus select, and view the final result of a specific variation site. Besides, a web-based submission tool is provided for direct submission, which can make the polymorphism information generated by the Chinese scientific community available from this resource.