www.dnalc.org Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is well known for its research and has a substantial learning center to provide education for the public. The website for the DNA Learning Center was launched in 1996 and after the human genome was completed in 2000, the mission of the learning center has been to prepare students and families to understand their genome and make informed health care choices. The outreach activities include class field trips to Cold Spring Harbor with hands-on laboratory experiments, interactive computer experiences, and a museum exhibition. Week long summer camps are held for school students and one-day sessions of Saturday DNA! provide learning experiences for the public. The Internet resources at the learning center receive nearly a million visits per month. The web delivered topics include basic heredity, genetic disorders, eugenics, the discovery of the structure of DNA, DNA sequencing, cancer, and plant genetics. Some content is also available on CD or DVD. A popular print resource is DNA Science, A First Course, providing an illustrated text with history and explanations plus laboratory protocols appropriate for high school and college classes (quoted cost $47). Finding what is on offer is easy by browsing through the resources section of the site. www.intechopen.com InTech, established in 2004, was one of the earliest pioneers of open access texts in the fields of Science, Technology, and Medicine. InTech currently provides publications from more than 60,000 authors in 13 journals and 1,525 books. The main subject area covered is engineering. However, books encompassing medical topics are increasing in representation, including biochemistry. The home page shows entries for Biochemistry, Genetics, and Molecular Biology under Life Sciences. The site is easily searched to locate the 443 page book “Biochemistry” edited by Deniz Ekinci (Turkey). This book is not a textbook, but rather an anthology of research progress in the medical applications of proteins, enzymes, cellular mechanisms, and pharmaceutical lead-compounds. The book is written by authors directly involved in the research. It would be a good source for advanced students doing project work on applied topics. There are four main sections in the book: Section 1—Proteins and hormones (e.g. Chapter 2: Peptides and Peptidomimetics as Tools to Probe Protein–Protein Interactions). Section 2—Enzymes (e.g. Chapter 8: Carbonic Anhydrase and Heavy Metals). Section 3—Metabolism and Mechanism (e.g. Chapter 11: Glucose metabolism and cancer). Section 4—Regulatory molecules (e.g. Chapter 18: Cholesterol: Biosynthesis, functional diversity, homeostasis, and regulation by natural products). All material is free, as you would expect from an open source. www.academicearth.org Academic Earth is a website founded in 2009 by Richard Ludlow and colleagues to offer free online video lectures from universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. The content includes coverage of astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and a range of liberal arts subjects. The idea behind Academic Earth came to Ludlow after seeing a video lecture from MIT Mathematics Professor Gilbert Strang. The provision of online courseware has burgeoned since 2009, but Academic Earth continues with the aim of remaining an easily accessible repository. The success of the site has been recognized by a corporate takeover in January 2012 (see www.ampushmedia.com) and by Bill Gates asserting that the approach used by Academic Earth could revolutionize the education industry. When visited, Academic Earth provided over 350 courses based on over 5,000 lectures. The home page has tempting presentations on a range of technical and general interest topics and it makes an excellent site to browse for constructive entertainment. One of the featured talks on visiting was Prototyping the Mouse by David Kelley of Stanford (it is not genomics, but the history of the computer mouse). The Biology banner leads to the subtopics genetics, molecular biology, and neuroscience. Chemistry includes organic chemistry. A feature of the site is organization of topics into courses and some courses can be taken for credit with reputable universities. The Cellular Respiration Course borrows from links to the Kahn Academy (www.khanacademy.org) and includes glycolysis, Krebs and the citric acid cycle, electron transport chain, oxidative phosphorylation, and photosynthesis. knalij.com KNALIJ, pronounced knowledge, works on the premise that everything is connected to everything (a statement widely attributed to Lenin) and draws visual maps of the connections between people or concepts. The application won an award in October 2011 from the US national Library of Medicine for innovation in access to data in research literature. KNALIJ was developed by Alan Finkel in Los Angeles and Steve Melnikoff, a visiting fellow at The University of Melbourne, Australia. KNALIJ organizes data from PubMed, or any other suitable data base, into visual maps as illustrated in Fig. 1. KNALIJ summarizes large amounts of information aggregated into clusters and shows linkages that are not evident from simple lists. When you go to the website you will see a search box saying “start your PubMed search here.” My first foray into the world of connections was to search for glycogen storage diseases. I was quickly rewarded with a map of publications centered on 143 core publications and a galaxy of radiating clusters labeled as pregnancy complications, point mutations, prenatal diagnosis, and much more. On the left hand side of the website, after an initial search has been performed, you can work through application tools and the map workshop. The preferences and advanced filter options can refine the map to focus on what is required. KNALIJ maps utilize both color and cluster positioning to convey information. The color scheme indicates cluster size, ranging from gray to green for smaller clusters to orange to red for larger ones. Although it is moderately intuitive to get started, and there are some YouTube demonstrations, a help tutorial would be a great addition to the site and I am assured it is on the way. KNALIJ maps from knalij.com. KNALIJ aggregates information in PubMed to show relationships between topics and concentrations of publications in a field of interest. Also it can be used to show collaboration between authors. The example in (a) aggregates the published output of the Medical Faculty at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and shows research strengths as clusters of publications radiating from individual researchers. Zooming in identifies the person at the focus of each cluster. The outlying orange dot indicated by the arrow is Graham Parslow, the principal author of Websites of Note. Altering the search to focus only on publications by Graham Parslow generated b. Zooming in to identify the individual papers represented in (b) showed that KNALIJ had cleverly aligned publications by overlap of content. Unlike a simple search that produces a linear list, rarely looked at beyond the top ten, the search results generated by KNALIJ produce a visual interpretation that encourages wider exploration and clarifies affinities. www.youtube.com/user/ResearchChannel The Research Channel operated for a decade to distribute content from 20 US universities including Yale. Unfortunately, it ceased to add new content after August 2010 when the University of Washington stopped subsidizing the project. Even so there is a wealth of legacy material here on topics that remain current. The offerings are particularly rich in the field of nutrition. www.wdl.org The World Digital Library is a well-funded UNESCO project providing access to primary materials, largely books and artwork, from countries and cultures around the world. The collection displays historical artifacts and observations organized by continental regions and has the greatest number of topics listed against Europe. The regional archives can be browsed or the entire collection searched by keywords. If you have a passion for history and anthropology then this site provides a wealth of browsing. A search for “medicine” returned 74 items illustrating medical publications from medieval times onwards. One item encountered was The Book of Medicinal and Nutritional Terms by Abu Muhammad Abdallah Ibn Ahmad Ibn al-Baitar Dhiya al-Din al-Malaqi (known as Ibn al-Baitar, circa 1197–1248 AD). Ibn al-Baitar was an Andalusian Arab scientist, botanist, pharmacist, and physician. He was born in Malaga, Spain, and died in Damascus, Syria. He is considered to be one of the major scientists of Muslim Spain. His father was a veterinarian, which earned him the nickname al-Baitar, Arabic for veterinarian. Ibn al-Baitar was also trained by a pioneering Andalusian botanist called Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati. Kitab Al-jami li-mufradat al-adwiya wa al-aghdhiya. The book of medicinal and nutritional terms is Ibn al-Baitar's best-known work. It is a pharmaceutical encyclopedia containing detailed descriptions of more than 1,400 medicinal plants, foods, and drugs, and gives their therapeutic values and medicinal uses. The book also includes references to 150 earlier Arabic authors and 20 Greek authors. www.cochrane.org An editorial in the Lancet proclaimed that the Cochrane Collaboration is an enterprise that rivals the Human Genome Project in its potential implications for modern medicine. At a recent Dean's Lecture in the medical Faculty of my university, a bemused titter of laughter followed when a speaker advocated that a relevant website to visit should be added to each patient's written prescription list. The speaker had in mind that this was the age when patients could and should take matters of their own health in hand and understand their problem and their treatment. A veteran medical practitioner subsequently declared that it was a bad idea and would encourage hypochondriacs. If that practitioner had read Druin Burch's book Taking the Medicine (published in 2010), he may have had a better appreciation of the harm done in an era of “doctor knows best.” The Cochrane Collaboration is an international network of more than 28,000 people from over 100 countries established in 1993. The result is over 5,000 Cochrane Reviews framed in accessible language to help doctors, policy makers, patients, and carers make better informed decisions about treatment. Druin Burch pointed out that the evidence-based approach to outcomes promoted by the Cochrane Collaboration has overturned expensive and dangerous practices in such areas as cardiac treatment. The treatments leading to adverse outcomes were often driven by biased research results promoted by big-Pharma who would consistently use selected subgroups and limited timeframes to report favorable outcomes. Cochrane Reviews aim to inform practitioners if an intervention is effective in a specific clinical context and patients can likewise assess the potential risks and benefits of their treatment. Searching on the topic vitamin D returned 270 entries listed by specific applications such as treating osteoporosis. I leant that the much hoped for treatment of multiple sclerosis using vitamin D has not yet produced any statistically convincing data. employees.csbsju.edu/hjakubowski/classes/Chem and Society/ChemDisMMChina.htm Henry Jakubowski (St. John's University, USA) and Xie Jianping (Southwest University, China) have collaborated to produce a teaching site organized as four divisions into the topics (1) Alcohol and Drug Abuse—The Biochemistry of Addiction, (2) Infectious Disease—Influenza, (3) Biochemistry Topics (multiple entries on basic chemistry and central dogma), and (4) Pandemic of the 21st Century: Obesity and Diabetes. The mix of topics, supported by primary and linked resources, are used todeliver Jakubowski's course titled (Bio)Chemistry and Society. www.humanproteinpedia.org Human Proteinpedia, initiated by Akhilesh Pandey at Johns Hopkins University, allows research laboratories to contribute to and maintain the Human Protein Reference Database. More than 70 labs regularly participate in this effort and currently 249 labs have made entries to this ever-growing data base (e.g. 2 million peptide identifications). While access is unlimited and free the database is carefully refereed for contributions. The data describes post-translational modifications, protein–protein interactions, tissue expression, expression in cell lines, subcellular localization, and enzyme substrate relationships. You might start with the section Example Annotations. If you have a specific search to follow then you can use the Query section. If you want a teaching resource with explanatory support for the structure and function of all proteins in the Protein Data Bank then it is better to visit Proteopedia (proteopedia.org).