About the author

Nick Oswald

Nick is a molecular biologist-turned-publisher. After a PhD in Developmental Biology and an eclectic seven years in biotech he is now Editorial Manager of Neuroendocrinology and the founder and Editor-In-Chief of Bitesize Bio. You are welcome to connect with Nick on LinkedIn

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I finally signed up for Google Reader last week after reading Bala’s great post last week on Google Reader for Academics.

Setting this up brought my attention to iGoogle, another very useful Google service.

iGoogle allows the user to create a personalised start page. One of it’s main features is the ability to add all sorts of useful gadgets written by Google and independent developers. Here are the top 10 molecular and cell biology-related iGoogle gadgets:

1.etBLAST Search A service developed by the Garner Lab at UT Southwestern to perform full-text comparison searches on a variety of academic text. Currently, Medline, Nasa, Institute of Physics, and the NIHs CRISP Grant database are available for searching.

2.PubMed Another search tool – this time allowing a Pubmed search to be performed from the iGoogle start page.

3.RCSB Protein Search A simple text search for entries in the RSCB Protein Data Bank.

4.ExPASy BLAST An easy way to perform a quick and simple BlastP search

5.Addgene Recent Plasmid Deposits As the name suggests – this tool keeps you informed of the latest deposits in the AddGene plasmid bank.

6.Timer Everyone needs a timer – here’s one for your iGoogle page.

7.To-Do List …and everyone needs a to do list. This simple to-do list allows you to sort tasks by priority.

8.PDB Structure Viewer Enter a Protein Databank ID and this tools allows you to view the structure, if available.

9.Oligo Tm calculator Can you guess what this one does?

10.Amino Acid Mass Calculator Paste in an amino acid sequence, hit the button and this tool calculates the molecular mass and amino acid composition for you.

So those are my favorite iGoogle gadgets, what are yours?