LuceGene release 1.4 is available now at http://www.gmod.org/lucegene/ and http://eugenes.org/gmod/lucegene/ LuceGene is an open-source document/object search and retrieval system specially tuned for bioinformatics text databases and documents. It is similar in concept to the commercial SRS package (Sequence Retrieval System). LuceGene is written in Java, built with the open-source Lucene package [http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/] This release includes an easy to use demonstration. Pop it into a Tomcat web server and run. LuceGene adds these bioinformatics methods to Lucene: * Indexing adaptors for formats such as XML, PDF Documents, Biosequences, Spreadsheets, HTML, and others, with fine tuning by data field. * Configurations for bio-data include UniProt/Swiss-Prot, Fasta and GenBank sequences, BIND protein interactions, BLAST outputs, Medline and others. * Support for batch-list look-ups and searches by ID, gene names, etc. * Web interface with paged results, batch downloads, search refinement and search-linking among data libraries. * Web Services support with a SOAP interface. * Output support for data-field selection and formats such as Spreadsheet, XML, HTML, and others. It can take as little as a few hours engineering time to add new databank parsing, making it a cost-effective way to use many bioinformatics data sets. LuceGene is speedy with big data sets: indexing and searching the UniProt library of 1.7 million sequences with LuceGene is comparable to using SRS. Gene Annotation object search and retrieval with LuceGene is 10x to 20x faster than using a Postgres Chado database. -- Don Gilbert Genome Informatics Lab Indiana University, Bloomington IN http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/gil/