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Scientific Resources
Contents
NIH Literature Databases
Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects
CRISP is a searchable database of federally funded biomedical research projects conducted at universities, hospitals, and other research institutions.
National Library of Medicine
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PubMed
PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.
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Bookshelf
A growing collection of biomedical books that can be searched.
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Biological Resources
Human
NCI Specimen Research Locator
The Specimen Resource Locator is a database to help researchers locate human specimens (tissue, serum, DNA/RNA, other specimens) for cancer research. It includes tissue banks and tissue procurement systems with access to normal, benign precancerous and cancerous human tissue from a variety of organs.
Cooperative Breast Cancer Tissue Resource
Provides access to formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded primary breast cancer tissue with associated clinical and follow-up data for research studies, particularly those studies focused on translating basic research findings into clinical application.
Study of Women's Health Across the Nation Repository (Supported by NIA)
The biologic specimen bank of the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN). SWAN is a National Institutes of Health funded, multi site, longitudinal study of the natural history of the midlife including the menopausal transition. The SWAN Repository contains blood and urine specimens, collected at each study participant's annual visit. In addition, a subset of participants provide urine samples over the length of one menstrual cycle each year. All of these samples are in the SWAN Repository, stored at -70°, and are available to researchers who wish to study the midlife and menopausal transition. A DNA repository, containing two types of specimens: whole blood and sputum pellets and immortalized cells, is being developed with approximately 50% of anticipated samples collected to date. All DNA samples are stored in liquid nitrogen. Scientists who use SWAN Repository specimens can also request data collected at participant's annual visits. Medical and health history, psychosocial measures, biological measures, and anthropometry are collected during the annual visit.
NHLBI Biological Specimen Repository (Supported by NHLBI)
The NHLBI has been vigilant in surveillance for new and emerging infectious agents that might contaminate the U.S. blood supply, and be transmitted by transfusions. Since the mid-1970s, the Institute's Blood Division has established and supported several large blood specimen repositories to perform prospective and retrospective studies of blood donors and recipients. About 90% of the samples are from the blood safety program, and the rest from other NHLBI programs. Use of these samples has been extensive, and from 1991-2004, a total of 148,667 specimens from the NHLBI Biological Specimen Repository were sent to various investigators.
National Disease Research Interchange
NDRI is a nonprofit organization that procures and distributes normal and diseased human tissues for laboratory research studies to investigators in academia, government, and industry. Core support for NDRI comes from NCRR, NEI, NIAID, NIDDK, NIAMS, and the Office of Rare Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Additional sources of support include the NDRI Partners Program, voluntary health organizations and private donations.
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Animal
Model Organisms for Biomedical Research
Information about national and international activities and major resources that are being developed to facilitate biomedical research using mammalian and nonmammalian models that include mouse, rat, yeast, amoebae, yeast, round worm, fruit fly, zebrafish, and frog.
Aged Rodent Colonies Handbook (Supported by NIA)
Rodent colonies maintained under contractual arrangement with commercial vendors. Animals are available to investigators at academic and nonprofit research institutions and are a limited resource developed for use in aging research. They are not available for use as a general source of adult animals for unrelated areas of research.
Aged Rodent Tissue Bank Handbook (Supported by NIA)
A repository of tissue collected from the NIA Aged Rodent Colonies that are barrier maintained and specific pathogen free. Tissues are fresh frozen and stored at –80 degrees Celsius. Tissue arrays containing multiple tissues from NIA rodents spanning the lifespan are now included in the tissue bank. Tissue from the NIA Aged Rodent Tissue Bank is available to investigators at academic and nonprofit research institutions who are engaged in funded research on aging.
Neural Tube Defect Resource (Supported by NICHD)
Distributes mouse models for neural tube defects.
Craniofacial Mutant Resource (Supported by NEI)
Provides the scientific community with mouse models for facial, dental, eye, ear and skull development research, as well as mouse models of human craniofacial syndromes.
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Non-Mammalian
Model Organisms for Biomedical Research
Information about national and international activities and major resources that are being developed to facilitate biomedical research using mammalian and nonmammalian models that include mouse, rat, yeast, amoebae, yeast, round worm, fruit fly, zebrafish, and frog.
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Cells
Stem Cells
NIH Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry
The official NIH resource for stem cell research.
National Stem Cell Resource (Supported by NCRR)
Accessions, characterizes, expands, preserves and distributes nonhuman embryonal stem cells, as well as postnatally derived stem cells from a variety of strains and species. The resource also standardizes and optimizes methodology and develops new antibody and DNA reagents in an attempt to make procedures and reagents broadly applicable across a range of species and strains.
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Other Cells
National Cell Culture Center (Supported by NCRR)
All basic research investigators are eligible to use this nonprofit national resource. The center provides large-scale production of mammalian cells-suspension culture (1 to 400 liters per day), anchorage-dependent culture (1 to 200 roller bottles per batch), insect/baculovirus culture (1 to 50 liters per day), purified monoclonal antibodies (10 mg to 100 grams per project), nonhybridoma cell-secreted proteins, and conditioned media.
Islet Cell Resource Centers (Supported by NCRR, NIDDK and others)
An interactive group of 10 academic laboratories that: provide pancreatic islets of cGMP-quality to eligible investigators for use in FDA-approved, IRB-approved transplantation protocols; optimize the harvest, purification, function, storage, and shipment of islets while developing tests that characterize the quality and predict the effectiveness of islets transplanted into patients with diabetes mellitus; and provide pancreatic islets for basic science studies.
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Reagents
NIH AIDS Research and Reference Reagent Program
Unique worldwide resource of over 6,300 state-of-the art reagents for HIV and other pathogens. Many of these reagents are not commercially available.
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Databases
NCBI Databases
Nucleotide, protein, structure, taxonomy, genome, expression, and chemical databases.
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Nucleotide Databases
NCBI's sequence databases accept genome data from sequencing projects from around the world and serve as the cornerstone of bioinformatics research. Includes: GenBank, EST database, GSS database, HomoloGene, HTG database, SNPs database, RefSeq, STS database, UniSTS, UniGene.
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Genome Specific Resources
NCBI provides access to the whole genomes of over 1,000 organisms. Genomes represent both completely sequenced organisms and those for which sequencing is in progress. Includes: bacteria, bee, cat, chicken, cow, eukaryotic organelles, frog, fruit fly, human, malaria, mouse, nematode, pig, plant genomes, rat, retroviruses, sheep, viral genomes, yeast, and zebrafish.
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Tools for Data Mining
Various data retrieval and submission tools, including text term searching, sequence similarity searching, taxonomy, and sequence submission.
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Tools for Sequence Analysis
Access to various sequence analysis tools.
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Tools for 3D Structure Display and Similarity Searching
Tools for comparative macromolecular and 3-dimensional structure analysis.
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Maps
Access to various genetic and physical maps.
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Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man
Catalog of human genes and genetic disorders. Contains textual information and references, links to MEDLINE and sequence records in the Entrez system, and links to additional related resources at NCBI and elsewhere.
Oral Pathogen Sequence Databases (Supported by NIDCR)
Molecular information pertaining to oral pathogens, bacterial and viral. Currently, the databases comprise Porphyromonas gingivalis, Streptococcus mutans, Fusobacterium nucleatum, Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans and Treponema denticola and Prevotella intermedia.
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Genetic and Genomic Resources
Quantitative PCR Primer Database (Supported by NCI)
Information about primers and probes that can be used to quantitate human and mouse mRNA by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT–PCR) assays. All data has been gathered from published articles, cited in PubMed.
Center for Inherited Disease Research (Supported by 12 NIH Institutes)
A centralized facility that provides genotyping and statistical genetics services for investigators seeking to identify genes that contribute to human disease. CIDR concentrates primarily on multifactorial hereditary disease although analysis of single gene disorders can also be accommodated. CIDR is available to all investigators through competitive peer review.
Pathogen Functional Genomics Resource Center (Supported by NIAID)
A centralized facility providing the research community with resources necessary to conduct functional genomics research on human pathogens and invertebrate vectors of infectious diseases. The PFGRC provides scientists with genomic resources and reagents such as microarrays, protein expression clones, genotyping and bioinformatics services.
Mammalian Gene Collection (Trans NIH)
Full-length open reading frame (FL-ORF) clones for human, mouse, and rat genes.
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NIH Clinical and Population Trials
Database of Longitudinal Studies (Supported by NIA)
A database of existing sources of longitudinal data on aging (e.g., ongoing longitudinal cohorts, longitudinal data sets, biospecimen repositories) for facilitating future research on aging changes across the lifespan. The longitudinal studies, data sets and repositories included in this database encompass a wide range of age groups (childhood to old age), studies in minority populations, as well as sources of longitudinal data existing in the United States and abroad.
Sample Recruitment Materials (Supported by NHLBI)
Examples of recruitment materials.
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