Bioinformatics components of the current Mouse Brain Library

One of our major goals in creating the Mouse Brain Library was to provide a central repository of high-quality histological material for the neuroscience community at large. Although originally thought of as a physical library from which researchers could "check out" slides for their experiments, the concept has evolved to that of a "virtual library." Over the past year in particular, we have concentrated significant effort and resources toward making the data contained in this library available over the web. Importantly, we have laid the groundwork for a future in which it will be possible to conduct a variety of neuroanatomical experiments over the Internet using readily available, platform-independent software.

Our web site at <nervenet.org> contains a wealth of information for neurogeneticists, including online versions of published and unpublished papers, links to important web resources, and a variety of databases. These databases include information on brain weight, sex, parity, body weight, etc., for over 5000 mice. In addition, the Mouse Brain Library database is available online and is available for downloading or can be searched using a web-based front end.  See Table1. Current Contents of the Mouse Brain Library