title: CRONOS: the cross-reference navigation server.
abstract: Cross-mapping of gene and protein identifiers between different databases is a tedious and time-consuming task. To overcome this, we developed CRONOS, a cross-reference server that contains entries from five mammalian organisms presented by major gene and protein information resources. Sequence similarity analysis of the mapped entries shows that the cross-references are highly accurate. In total, up to 18 different identifier types can be used for identification of cross-references. The quality of the mapping could be improved substantially by exclusion of ambiguous gene and protein names which were manually validated. Organism-specific lists of ambiguous terms, which are valuable for a variety of bioinformatics applications like text mining are available for download.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  CRONOS is freely available to non-commercial users at http://mips.gsf.de/genre/proj/cronos/index.html, web services are available at http://mips.gsf.de/CronosWSService/CronosWS?wsdl.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (MIPS), Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health (GmbH), Ingolstädter Landstrasse 1, D-85764 Neuherberg, Germany. brigitte.waegele@helmholtz-muenchen.de
authors.forename: Brigitte
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Waegele
authors.forename: Irmtraud
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Dunger-Kaltenbach
authors.forename: Gisela
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Fobo
authors.forename: Corinna
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Montrone
authors.forename: H-Werner
authors.initials: HW
authors.lastname: Mewes
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ruepp
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D005796:Genes; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D011506:Proteins; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins