UniGene (20) is a system for partitioning transcript sequences (including ESTs) from GenBank into a nonredundant set of clusters, each of which represents a potential gene locus. UniGene clusters are created for all organisms for which there are 70 000 or more ESTs in GenBank and includes ESTs for 56 animals, 43 plants and fungi and another 6 eukaryotes. UniGene databases are updated weekly with new EST sequences, and bimonthly with newly characterized sequences. As an aid to identifying a UniGene cluster, ProtEST presents precomputed BLAST alignments between protein sequences from model organisms and the six-frame translations of nucleotide sequences in UniGene.
