ConnectedBases

Spend a lot of time using the web interface to NCBI BLAST or other NCBI services? Want to minimize the time you spend opening BLAST or PubMed search pages? Bookmarklets ^? are a handy way to quickly search for information. Save these bookmarklets for easy use by dragging any of the links below to your bookmarks bar, as pictured here:

Then, there are 2 ways to use the bookmarklet:

• Highlight text within a webpage, then click the bookmarklet, and a NCBI search will be started using the selected text as the search parameters.
• Click the bookmarklet and a pop-up window will appear, into which you can paste your search term(s) or sequence. Click “OK” and the specified search will load in your current window.

1. Search Pubmed–The starting point for any biomedical scientific literature search.
2. Search PubMedCentral–A great tool to find articles that may only mention your term of interest in the discussion, methods, or figures of the paper.
3. BLASTN–Find nucleotide matches to your nucleotide sequence.
4. BLASTP–Find protein matches to your protein.
5. BLASTX–Find protein matches to the 6 frame translation of your nucleotide sequence in Genbank.
6. Search All Entrez–Find all references to a set of terms in all NCBI Entrez databases
7. Search Entrez Protein–Use accession numbers, protein functions, and other keywords to find proteins of interest.
8. Search Entrez Nucleotide–Use accession numbers, gene identifiers, and other terms to find nucleotide sequences.
9. Search Entrez Genome–Use variety of terms to find genomic sequences, integrated genetic and physical maps, and sequence maps.
10. Search Entrez Gene–Search the NCBI database of genes from RefSeq genomes.

Obviously, NCBI and NLM provide dozens of resources, but hopefully these search tools will be useful to you. I have tested these in Firefox 2.0 and Safari on Mac OS X 10.4.9.

These bookmarklets were adapted from those available at Jesse’s Bookmarklet Site.