Comparative Review of Orbigen, NIH Mammalian Gene Collection and Origene Websites.
Title: Orbigen, Mammalian
Gene Collection-NIH, Origene.com
URL:
http://www.origene.com/humgen.html
Date Reviewed: May 20,2002
Description and strengths: Orbigen is a company
website featuring its products and services, some of them quite novel indeed.
For instance,they will custom synthesize fluorescently labeled ds RNAi
oligonucleotides. They also offer more than 14,000 ready to use full-length mouse cDNA clones, which can be tagged and
sub-cloned in to an appropriate vector for $499/gene. Furthermore, they can
also produce polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies against your gene product. It
also flaunts a nice collection of protocols and RNAi links.
Orbigen has its mouse Genes
very well organized with the corresponding NCBI entry for the cDNA, locuslink
and Unigene links. It has a fairly comprehensive protocol and RNAi section.
Fluorescently labeled Rnai is a novel product being offered by them. Bookmarks
section pretty good too.
In comparison, the MGC-NIH provides a complete set of
full-length (open reading frame) sequences and cDNA clones of expressed genes
for human and mouse. These include 10802 distinct human clone and 8144
distinct genes and 6336 distinct mouse clones and 5433 distinct genes. The
information about the vector
maps and protocols is described. The information about the clones and their
NIH genbank, locus link entries etc are very well organized.
OriGene has not only the full-length clones of cDNAs that
correspond to NM sequences the mRNA sequences annotated by NCBI, but also their
cDNA libraries contain full-length clones that match the predicted genes
identified by XM accession numbers in RefSeq, thus allowing research on
predicted genes. It offers three search options to search by nucleotide
sequence (via BLAST), by accession number and by domain.
Weaknesses:
Orbigen has bothersome
frames and frequent error messages.
To buy a clone from MGC, one needs
to link up to ATCC. The ATCC site itself is not very user-friendly, one has to
navigate through a sea of information and product categories to finally find
the clones.
One needs to register at
Origene to even look at the clones that are available. The clones available at
Origene are restricted to those with accession numbers beginning with XM or NM
and from among those to they may not have the clone you are looking for. The
collection of available clones is not
very comprehensive.
Comprehensiveness: MGC-NIH and Origene both
have about the same number of human cDNA clones. Orbigen has no human clones
only mouse, but very comprehensive set of mouse clones (>14,000)
Timeliness:
For orbigen, I came up with
a last updated date of 09/30/01 (lacking in timeliness)
MGC-NIH was updated last on
May 20, 2002 (excellent timeliness)
Origene seems good in terms
of timeliness ( March 2002)
Ease of Use:
Orbigen: Medium
MGC-NIH: Medium
Origene: Medium
Responsiveness:
Orbigen: Medium
MGC-NIH: Medium
Origene: Medium
Similar or Related Sites:
http://www.genecopoeia.com/
Overall Evaluation:
Orbigen: 4
MGC-NIH: 4.5
Origene: 4
Reviewer: Shveta Taparia
Email: shveta.taparia@tufts.edu