WebWise: Guide to The Sanger Center’s Web Site

This installment of the WebWise series reviews The Sanger Center’s web site (http://www.sanger.ac.uk/). The Sanger Center, one of the larger sequencing centers involved in the Human Genome Project, has made the necessary commitment to establish and maintain a world class web site. This web site also has a uniform style, which has the twofold benefit of making the whole site feel like a cohesive package, as well as enhancing the browsing experience. The Sanger Center provides a wealth of data on its web site; at the time of this writing, it reports having finished >30 million bases of human DNA sequence. Their main sequencing efforts are chromosomes 1, 6, 20, 22, and X, but they are also collaborating on sequencing small regions of chromosomes 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 16. The site map depicted in Figure 1 illustrates the overall organization of this web site, and the main features of the web site are highlighted in Table1. This web site is extensively interlinked, and for some features several alternate routes are provided to access the data; for example, links to the FTP site are provided on several different pages. In general, navigation is not difficult because a convenient header is provided at the top of most pages that allows the user to maneuver between different areas of the web site. Note that these internal links, as well as most duplicate or minor links, have been omitted from Figure 1.