“While not all progress is necessarily good, isn't progress still preferable to stagnation?”

It describes a useful resource: a database of genomic sequences and annotations that now includes 18 vertebrate and 19 invertebrate genomes, with a layer of web applications for visualization, querying, and sequence similarity search. In 2006, our website served up an average of 12 million pages to 73,600 different IP addresses per month. We answer many usage questions daily from researchers around the world.

It is a synthesis: a collection of data and analyses from other sources, combined with some local analyses, presented in a dynamic and interactive way.

It supports new bioinformatics methodologies by making it easy to download large amounts of public sequence and annotations, to narrow the volume of data by complex querying, and to visualize genomic data.

We provide a website with data and tools for molecular biologists and bioinformaticians. There are graphical tools, search tools, data-mining tools, bulk downloads, and terabytes of underlying data from humans and many other species.

Some example types of data are genome sequences, genes, and similarities between different species’ genomes, variation between different members of the same species, and information about when and where particular genes are turned on or off.

We don't generate the biological sequence data; we collect it, organize it, run programs to analyze it, and provide tools that help to understand it. Scientists can upload their own data to be viewed or queried together with our database, collect data for research, and draw figures for presentations or publications.

The Genome Browser and other tools on our website are all the brainchildren of Jim Kent and David Haussler. My background is in computing (hardware and software); in 2002, I started reading up on the exciting field of bioinformatics, learned about Jim’s work, saw that he was hiring to build up this resource and managed to convince him that I could help.

The group has since grown to include many programmers and quality assurance engineers as well as postdocs and grad students who contribute annotations and code while using the Genome Browser to visualize results of their research. It's a terrific team effort.

The amount of public genomic data has been growing exponentially, and that has become a challenge—the disk space and computation requirements are considerable but manageable, but meanwhile just tracking all of the data sets in our processing and testing pipeline has been taking more and more time. We are working on automating as much of our pipeline as possible.

We take public data, and make it more accessible. Some might be concerned that certain genomic data, e.g., the sequence of the SARS virus, are inherently dangerous and should not be out in the open for anyone to see. However, I feel that, on balance, it is better for knowledge to be available to everyone than locked up. I believe that openness of information enables progress in general. While not all progress is necessarily good, isn’t progress still preferable to stagnation?