Genew, the Human Gene Nomenclature Database http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/nomenclature/searchgenes.pl is the only resource that provides data for all human genes that have approved symbols. It is managed by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) as a confidential database, containing over 22 000 records, 75% of which are represented online by a publicly searchable text file. Since 2002, there have been significant improvements to the Genew search engine. Additionally we have increased our capacity to analyse confidential sequence data, which has enabled us to manage the large numbers of gene symbol requests that we receive from the chromosome sequencing consortia.