ORFDB: An information resource linking scientific content to a high-quality Open Reading Frame (ORF) collection

The ORFDB (http://orf.invitrogen.com/) represents an ongoing effort at Invitrogen Corporation to integrate relevant scientific data with an evolving collection of human and mouse Open Reading Frame (ORF) clones (Ultimate™ ORF Clones). The ORFDB serves as a central data warehouse enabling researchers to search the ORF collection through its web portal ORFBrowser, allowing researchers to find the Ultimate™ ORF clones by blast, keyword, GenBank accession, gene symbol, clone ID, Unigene ID, LocusLink ID or through functional relationships by browsing the collection via the Gene Ontology (GO) Browser. As of October 2003, the ORFDB contains 6200 human and 2870 mouse Ultimate™ ORF clones. All Ultimate™ ORF clones have been fully sequenced with high quality, and are matched to public reference protein sequences. In addition, the cloned ORFs have been extensively annotated across six categories: Gene, ORF, Clone Format, Protein, SNP and Genomic links, with the information assembled in a format termed the ORFCard. The ORFCard represents an information repository that documents the sequence quality, alignment with respect to public protein sequences, and the latest publicly available information associated with each human and mouse gene represented in the collection.