ETHNOS: A versatile electronic tool for the development and curation of national genetic databases GENOME DATABASES Table 1. Features of the national and ethnic mutation database (NEMDBs) generated for the European Commission-funded MEDGENET project. NEMDB URL Number of records Disease summaries Populations/ ethnicities Search Genetic laboratories Search (1) option Yes Yes Yes No Year of first release 2006 2005 2008 2007 References 5,6 7 8 This paper Israeli Cypriot* Tunisian Lebanese* http://www. goldenhelix. org/israeli http://www. goldenhelix. org/cypriot http://www. goldenhelix. org/tunisian http://www. goldenhelix. org/ lebanese 476 28 102 89 29 3 – 2 945 70 165 130 17 – – – Egyptian http://www. 38 – 94 – No 2008 goldenhelix. org/ egyptian *The Cypriot and Lebanese NEMDBs were ﬁrst generated as national mutation frequency databases and have been subsequently upgraded into their current form. This paper disorders studied for the different religious groups within the Israeli population. The Israeli population is an amalgamation of several religious groups — namely, Jewish (5.4 million) and non-Jewish, such as Muslim (1.2 million, including the Bedouin), Christian (150,000), Druze (120,000) and other, smaller groups (Table 1). Most of the Arab and Druze populations live in villages or small towns, and consanguinity is a frequent phenomenon.9,10 The database source was previous compilations for the incidence of genetic disorders in Israel.5 New data are contributed by database curators or are retrieved from the published literature, while data- base entries are periodically checked for consistency and corrected where needed. The Israeli NEMDB is the richest in information among all NEMDBs developed for this project, with 476 disease summaries documented for the religious groups, which have been further classiﬁed into 29 ethnic subgroups in the Israeli population. This corresponds to a 28 per cent content increase since the initial publication of the database. This has led to a signiﬁcant increase in user trafﬁc in the Israeli NEMDB, while the ‘Search þ’ feature is becoming increasingly popular among clinical gen- eticists in Israel ( personal communication). This feature enables the acquisition of information on the genetic diseases that exist in each of the localities where Arabs and Druze live. This func- tionality ensures that patient privacy and anonymity are preserved, since data access and retrieval are password protected.6 Data querying can be per- formed according to locality or disorder, while the query output is a list of prevalent disorders in certain localities, or different religious groups. In addition, 17 genetic laboratories are archived in the database, together with details on the genetic tests that they provide. Notably, according to a new initiative, genetic laboratories are mandated to report the details of the tests they are performing in the Israeli NEMDB in order to obtain accreditation from the Israeli Ministry of Health. Although this # HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1479–7364. HUMAN GENOMICS. VOL 4. NO 5. 361–368 JUNE 2010 365