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BioTechniquesVol. 40, No. 2 WebWatchOpen AccessWebWatchKevin AhernKevin AhernSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:21 May 2018https://doi.org/10.2144/06402WW01AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail The Vision ThingYou may not realize it, but macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people over the age of 55. That's a scary thought for a rapidly aging group of baby boomers. The Foundation Fighting Blindness is a charitable organization aimed at preventing, treating, and curing a broad spectrum of retinal diseases, including macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa (degeneration of photoreceptor cells), Stargardt disease (juvenile macular degeneration), and Usher syndrome (hearing impairment at birth followed by retinitis pigmentosa). The site abounds with educational content about each of these diseases, as well as clinical trial summaries, and descriptions of experimental therapies. A site with a mission to inform and serve.www.blindness.orgOrientation ExpressLook in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and you'll find thousands of structures of proteins embedded in or associated with the cell's phospholipid bilayer. Search for information about how these proteins are oriented in the membrane, and you'll draw a blank. That didn't sit well with Andrei Lomize and coworkers, so they developed a computational approach to optimize the spatial arrangement of proteins in membranes and then applied it to all known transmembrane complexes in PDB. Abracadabra! Thus was the Orientations of Proteins in Membranes (OPM) database born. At the OPM site, you'll discover 162 proteins from over 60 species grouped according to type, class, family, superfamily, and localization site. Click on a desired protein, and you can view it in ribbon form or in 3-D relative to the membrane it resides in.opm.phar.umich.eduSearching SmartsTalk to Tom Sharpton, cofounder of the interesting Siphs site, and you'll discover a young scientist bursting with enthusiasm. It's no surprise that these qualities carry over entirely into the design of his web site. With a dogged determination to put scientists together to share important information, Siphs’ philosophy is rooted in sharing the expertise of its users. Towards this end, newcomers identify their areas of expertise on registration, and questions are posted to these areas. Siphs’ users answer each other's questions using a bulletin board style of format along with the assistance of a search engine. Bringing together a community of scholars in this way is a brilliant idea—who better knows the ins and outs of a problem than one working on it?www.siphs.com/ate/index.jspAnimal SentinelsFor detecting lethal, odorless gases like carbon monoxide in mines, a canary was a miner's best friend because if it died or got sick, it was time to make serious plans for exit. Besides canaries, other organisms also provide important information relating to human health. The Canary Database, currently in beta testing at Yale, is a great place to learn more about, for example, birds as an early warning system for an avian flu epidemic. From information on an animal's exposure to reagents to linkages between human and animal health outcomes, the Canary Database is chock full of data from over 1600 curated, peer-reviewed articles that will be welcomed by environmental health specialists.canarydatabase.orgGenome Du JourCan it possibly be 10 years since the complete sequence of the first organismal genome, that of Haemophilus influenzae, was determined? Since that momentous event, over 330 genomes have been completed and published, representing a new genome about every 11 days. One of the more interesting genomic projects currently underway (of approximately 1700 in progress) is the Salamander Genome Project, hosted at the University of Kentucky. Salamanders are model vertebrate organisms for vision, renal function, embryogenesis and, perhaps most interestingly, tissue/limb regeneration. At the site, visitors can follow the progress of this project, check out the expressed sequence tag (EST) database, access linkage map information, and much more. If one day we learn to regenerate human organs, it may come as a result of information from the salamander.salamander.uky.eduFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Vol. 40, No. 2 Follow us on social media for the latest updates Metrics Downloaded 137 times History Published online 21 May 2018 Published in print February 2006 Information© 2006 Author(s)PDF download