Genomics Glossaries & Taxonomies

Welcome to http://www.bioon.com 

The glossaries will function best with feedback from you in the trenches on emerging meanings, ambiguous or confusing terminology, and related or tangential terms for inclusion. 

Applications- biotech & pharma 
alliance networks - transcriptomics

Informatics overview  3D-QSAR - taxonomy

Technologies overview 
AFM Atomic Force Microscopy  - zeptomole 

Biology overview  
apoptosis - working draft - human genome

      How terms were chosen & defined  

      Audience: Not just for scientists  Scope: Selective (15 - 40 definitions each) glossaries focus on words and phrases relevant to biotechnology and pharmaceutical sciences, and not easily found in dictionaries (such as or microarrays or transcriptomics ). 

      Some definitions are evolving as genomic, whole genome and molecular implications are incorporated into existing words (like gene or phenotype). Others need a genomic context (profiling or scoring). 

      In- depth glossaries include additional specialized terms for some categories, and selected organizations, government agencies and cryptic acronyms.

      Terminology relevant to genomics comes from a wide variety of disciplines: analytical chemistry, biochemistry, bioinformatics, biocomputing, biomechanics, biophysics, biotechnology, cell biology, clinical and research medicine, developmental and structural biology, electrochemistry, electronics, engineering, enzymology, epidemiology,  imaging, immunology, mathematics, microbiology, molecular biology, optics, pharmacology, public health, statistics, toxicology, virology and aspects of  business, chaos theory, ethics and law are all relevant. 

      Few people (if any) can be truly interdisciplinary and expert in all of these subjects. We all need to learn more to participate in informed public debate.

      Genomics Glossaries reviews
      Internet Scout Report 
        June 20, 2001
       
      Science Magazine Functional Genomics Resources "Finding the right word" A guide to some useful online glossaries   Post-genomics, biotech and bioinformatics   
      "Omics, Schmomics" Jocelyn Kaiser ed.  NetWatch Science 292 (5522): 1615, 1 June 2001 http://www.sciencemag.org/genomicglossaries/vol292/issue5522/netwatch.shtml

ABOUT THE LEXICOGRAPHER  Mary Chitty, Library Director at Cambridge Healthtech Institute,  is the author of Federal Information Sources in Health and Medicine (Greenwood Press, 1988) and a number of book reviews. Prior to joining CHI she was Head of Reference at the library of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, Boston MA and had supervised the Air Pollution Technical Information Center at the US EPA Library, Research Triangle Park, NC. She was previously a picture researcher and fact- checker in the US and England. She has an MSLS from University of  North Carolina - Chapel Hill and a BA (Anthropology) from Yale.


Cambridge
Healthtech Institute