ABSTRACT
The study of genomics is based upon information rst gathered in an organized way in an undertaking known as the Human Genome Project. This project was executed by an international consortium and resulted in a data bank of the linear sequence of DNA over not only all human chromosomes, but also those of a number of model species. These data (GenBank) are freely available to international science through the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine, U.S. Building on this foundation, the information in this data bank accumulates as the genomes of additional species are analyzed. The availability of these linear sequence data has led to the growing disciplines of genomics, comparative genomics, bioinformatics, systems biology, and toxicogenomics.
