The National Geographic Society and IBM are teaming up to map the history of human migration using DNA. The Genographic Project aims to collect 100,000 genetic samples which will be used trace the movements of humans out of Africa and around the globe. While the most useful samples will come from indiginous populations, members of the general public will be able to mail in their own DNA on special cheek swabs.

When I was researching the above article, the following projects caught my eye:

cytoscape.org: ‘Cytoscape is an open source bioinformatics software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks and integrating these interactions with gene expression profiles and other state data.’

geneontology.org: ‘The goal of the Gene Ontology project is to produce a controlled vocabulary that can be applied to all organisms even as knowledge of gene and protein roles in cells is accumulating and changing. GO provides three structured networks of defined terms to describe gene product attributes. GO is one of the controlled vocabularies of the Open Biomedical Ontologies.’”