In this issue

Peter Giles et al. present a relational database for pathogenic fungi genomic and EST sequence and demonstrate its utility by using it to analyse amino acid biosynthetic pathways using the mix of complete and incomplete gene inventories currently available. Sandra Orchard and colleagues report on the first meeting of the HUPO Proteomics Standards Initiative, which included discussions on standards for protein–protein interactions and mass spectrometry. Beatrice Demontera outlines the ethical issues relating to cloned and transgenic animals, highlighting a genomic approach that could provide a better understanding of the identity of these animals. John Allen discusses the existing theories as to why chloroplasts and mitochondria have genomes, then makes the case for his co-location for redox regulation (CORR) hypothesis. Buschlen et al. present a microarray study of HAP2 and HAP4 yeast mutants, to discover which genes (in particular of those encoding mitochondrial proteins) are regulated by these two genes that are known to be involved in the switch from fermen-tative to respiratory metabolism. Manal Dayem and colleagues describe their microarray analysis of gene expression in wounded human keratinocytes, to study the molecular events triggered in the early stages of the wound healing process. Sujay Chattopadhyay and colleagues report on their comparative analysis of base composition pressures in the protein coding genes of a range of Archaea. Luca Bernardi and co-organizers report on the ESF funded workshop on Ontology for Biology, which brought together computer scientists, computer linguists , philosophers and biologists. Evelyn Camon and colleagues present the Gene Ontology (GO) annotation project (GOA), in which proteins in the SWISS-PROT, TrEMBL, InterPro and Ensembl databases are being annotated with GO terms. Christian Blaschke and Alfonso Valencia present an automated classification of protein function from the literature, based on statistical information extraction techniques. Alexa McCray describes the construction of an upper-level ontology, called the UMLS semantic network, for the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Esther Ratsch and co-workers discuss their efforts towards developing a protein interaction ontology, with an initial focus on signal transduc-tion pathways.