CRONOS: the cross-reference navigation server

Summary: 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. Availability: 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. Contact: brigitte.waegele@helmholtz-muenchen.de Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. The online Supplementary Material contains all figures and tables referenced by this article.