item suggestion

Hi,

I am a fellow at the systems biology department in Harvard, and I am very interested in photosynthesis research. Have been enjoying getting useful information through your mailing list.

I thought the following item might be of interest even though more general than photosynthesis per se.

Best,

Ron

BioNumbers – the database of useful biological numbers

Dear all, 

I have a non-standard post, but one that will hopefully be of interest to this community.  A group of us in the systems biology department at Harvard Medical have built a database to store useful biological numbers ( www.bionumbers.org ), such as cell and organelle sizes, diffusion coefficients, protein concentrations, and much more ranging from molecular biology to physiology and ecology.

We built the database because of a common realization of how many hours it can take to find even the most trivial numbers in the biological literature. And then once the number is found, where to store the information for future use?  Bionumbers is more permanent and more searchable than post-it notes.  The site is meant to rapidly connect you to literature sources - a sort of Pubmed for numbers, and provide wiki-like to comment on numbers as well as contribute new numbers.

Please check out our database and maybe even enter some numbers you would like to keep track of - all database users will benefit from your entry.  BioNumbers is a long-term project and will be continually improved for the foreseeable future.  Any suggestions to make the database more useful are very welcome ( bionumbers@... ).