Web resources for model organism studies

An ever-growing number of resources on model organisms have emerged with the continued development of sequencing technologies. In this paper, we review 13 databases of model organisms, most of which are reported by the National Institutes of Health of the United States (NIH; http://www.nih.gov/science/models/). We provide a brief description for each database, as well as detail its data source and types, functions, tools, and availability of access. In addition, we also provide a quality assessment about these databases. Significantly, the organism databases instituted in the early 1990s--such as the Mouse Genome Database (MGD), Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD), and FlyBase--have developed into what are now comprehensive, core authority resources. Furthermore, all of the databases mentioned here update continually according to user feedback and with advancing technologies.