I attended a seminar today where the speaker mentioned a gene whose name or function I’ve never heard of before. I used to use Wikipedia to look up a gene but that source is frowned upon by the scientific communtiy due to its unreliability. Now I use NCBI’s Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) which gives a nice condense summary of common knowledge on a gene.
Another one of the graduate students in my lab suggested iHOP that not only has a cool looking monkey on the front page but is also presents a page describing a gene that is loaded with links to various abstracts contained within PubMed.
What tools does everyone else out there use?
A friend of mine suggested genecards.
I use iHop, Expasy and whatever species specific database exists (HPRD for human, SGD for S. cerevisiae, etc).
I prefer the Gene database at the NCBI since it gets updated more regularly than OMIM.
I made a tutorial that shows how to use it here, and to see the whole thing plus some other alternatives for finding gene information, you can start from here.