IDconverter and IDClight: Conversion and annotation of gene and protein IDs

Background: Researchers involved in the annotation of large numbers of gene, clone or protein identifiers are usually required to perform a one-by-one conversion for each identifier. When the field of research is one such as microarray experiments, this number may be around 30,000. Results: To help researchers map accession numbers and identifiers among clones, genes, proteins and chromosomal positions, we have designed and developed IDconverter and IDClight. They are two user-friendly, freely available web server applications that also provide additional functional information by mapping the identifiers on to pathways, Gene Ontology terms, and literature references. Both tools are high-throughput oriented and include identifiers for the most common genomic databases. These tools have been compared to other similar tools, showing that they are among the fastest and the most up-to-date. Conclusion: These tools provide a fast and intuitive way of enriching the information coming out of high-throughput experiments like microarrays. They can be valuable both to wet-lab researchers and to bioinformaticians. © 2007 Alibés et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.