We are pleased to announce the Tetrahymena Genome Database (TGD; www.ciliate.org), a web-accessible resource for information about the Tetrahymena thermophila genomes, their genes and gene products.

Currently, TGD provides manually curated descriptions of approximately 250 T. thermophila macronuclear genes that have been submitted to public sequence databases. These descriptions include brief summaries of the genes, some Gene Ontology (GO, www.geneontology.org) annotations, and the literature describing the genes. TGD also provides the preliminary gene models for the T. thermophila macronuclear genome determined by Jonathan Eisen's group at The Institute of Genomic Research (TIGR,; http://www.tigr.org/tdb/e2k1/ttg/). Automatic annotations of the preliminary gene models are available, including top BLASTP identified similarities, protein domain predictions, and predicted GO annotations.

TGD also provides a graphical view of the genome features using GBrowse (www.gmod.org), a BLAST/BLAT server to allow direct sequence similarity searches of DNA and protein datasets of interest to protozoan researchers, and a tool for querying the complete text of selected Tetrahymena published articles. TGD can be queried using gene names, published author's names, and keywords commonly found in functional descriptions.