The Omics world

A lot of you have heard me complain ( sometimes unfairly) about how hard it is to tie-up sequence data from NCBI with protein data from Swissprot and Uniprot.
I just saw this on the gene announce mailing list

“

In collaboration with UniProtKB  (http://www.pir.uniprot.org/) ,  the RefSeq group is now  reporting explicit cross-references to Swiss-Prot and  TrEMBL proteins  that correspond to a RefSeq protein. These correspondences are being calculated by the UniProtKB group, and will be updated every three weeks to correspond to UniProt’s release cycle. The data are being made available  from several sites within NCBI:

“

This is a very nice development. I have always tended to look at the cross-references from within NCBI records for information on swissprot ids. But now I can easily linkout to the wealth of protein information provided at uniprot from my NCBI search results.

This simple announcment also brings to the fore once again the complex inter-relationships between a lot of life-science data and why I dont think there will ever be a single google styled life-science database.