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The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) aims to assign a unique gene symbol and name to every human gene. The HGNC database currently contains almost 30,000 approved gene symbols, over 19,000 of which represent protein-coding genes. The public website, www.genenames.org, displays all approved nomenclature within Symbol Reports that contain data curated by HGNC editors and links to related genomic, phenotypic and proteomic information. Here we describe improvements to our resources, including a new Quick Gene Search, a new List Search, an integrated HGNC BioMart and a new Statistics and Downloads facility.

The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) aims to give every human gene a unique and ideally meaningful name and symbol. The HGNC database, previously known as Genew, contains over 22,000 public records with approved human gene nomenclature and associated information. The database has undergone major improvements throughout the last year, is publicly available for online searching at http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/nomenclature/searchgenes.pl and has a new custom downloads interface at http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/nomenclature/gdlw.pl.

The HGNC Comparison of Orthology Predictions search tool, HCOP (http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/nomenclature/hcop.pl ), enables users to compare predicted human and mouse orthologs for a specified gene, or set of genes, from either species according to the ortholog assertions from the Ensembl, HGNC, Homologene, Inparanoid, MGI and PhIGs databases. Users can assess the reliability of the prediction from the number of these different sources that identify a particular orthologous pair. HCOP provides a useful one-stop resource to summarise, compare and access various sources of human and mouse orthology data.

Genew, the Human Gene Nomenclature Database http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/nomenclature/searchgenes.pl is the only resource that provides data for all human genes that have approved symbols. It is managed by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) as a confidential database, containing over 22 000 records, 75% of which are represented online by a publicly searchable text file. Since 2002, there have been significant improvements to the Genew search engine. Additionally we have increased our capacity to analyse confidential sequence data, which has enabled us to manage the large numbers of gene symbol requests that we receive from the chromosome sequencing consortia.