The path to enlightenment: making sense of genomic and proteomic information

Whereas genomics describes the study of genome, mainly represented by its gene expression on the DNA or RNA level, the term proteomics denotes the study of the proteome, which is the protein complement encoded by the genome. In recent years, the number of proteomic experiments increased tremendously. While all fields of proteomics have made major technological advances, the biggest step was seen in bioinformatics. Biological information management relies on sequence and structure databases and powerful software tools to translate experimental results into meaningful biological hypotheses and answers. In this resource article, I provide a collection of databases and software available on the Internet that are useful to interpret genomic and proteomic data. The article is a toolbox for researchers who have genomic or proteomic datasets and need to put their findings into a biological context.