ce and multiple structure alignments. Other features added this year are on-the-fly alignment of the sequences of homologs, so that an Entrez user may easily map conserved sequence features onto the know 3D structure. These software features are intended to facilitate molecular biologist's identification of important structure-function relationships within protein families. Work this year has concentrated on improvements to CN3D. The software has been modified to use an industry-standard 3D graphics library, OpenGL, which provides much better quality molecular graphics rendering. We have also added core-structure alignment editing and threading tools to the sequence display windows, to support curation of CDD (a Conserved Domain Database). Work is in progress to revise and simplify the data structures underlying CN3D, so that further improvments in graphcis presentation, specific to describing conserved features in protein families, may be added to future versions of CN3D. A new version of Cn3D incorporating these changes was released in June, 2002 and downloaded by over 50,000 users as of October, 2002. This version provides sophisticated alignment editing tools, in addition to greatly improved molecular graphics performance on popular computing platforms. As of October, 2003, over 150,000 copies of CN3D have been downloaded. A new "related structures" link has been added to NCBI BLAST servers, to provide easy-to use mapping to 3D structure whenever possible.

The incidence of obesity worldwide continues to escalate with the spread of the Western diet and with it there has been a corresponding increase in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, end-stage renal disease and other obesity-related disorders. Of all the causes for obesity, the predominant one seems to be choice - the choice to eat more and exercise less. One of the choices that has been linked with obesity has been the selection of a high fat, calorically dense diet. Despite much research on the link between fat intake and obesity, relatively little is kno