Tool of the Week: OMIM

OMIM, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, has a new interface. "OMIM is a comprehensive, authoritative compendium of human genes and genetic phenotypes that is freely available and updated daily. The full-text, referenced overviews in OMIM contain information on all known Mendelian disorders and over 12,000 genes. OMIM focuses on the relationship between phenotype and genotype."

This interface for OMIM should be used in lieu of the NCBI interface as it is not currently being updated with new data. OMIM's development began in the early 1960s with work by Dr. Victor A. McKusick who compiled a catalog of Mendelian traits and disorders, Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM). Between 1966 and 1998, twelve editions of MIM were published. In 1985, an online version, OMIM, was developed by the National Library of Medicine and Johns Hopkins' William H. Welch Medical Library. OMIM was available on the Internet beginning in 1987, and in 1995 became available on the WWW due to work by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Today, OMIM is written and edited at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.