The really BIG news for this release is the Xfam-Biomart. Which finally allows researchers to easily fetch all the sequences in Rfam from their favourite organism. For example, lets pretend I was really interested in Helicobacter pylori 35A. I go to the NCBI Taxonomy, look the species up there and record the taxid (585535). Back at the Biomart I enter the taxid beside "NCBI Taxonomy ID:", hit "Next", then select a number of handy looking features, hit "Results" and suddenly I have ALL the sequences from Helicobacter pylori 35A. This is an extraordinarily useful feature that has, until now, been missing from the Xfam arsenal. I'll be making heavy use of it in future.
See the Xfam blog for more details.
Glad you like it! What would be really cool would be to have alignment software built into the biomart, so you could retrieve aligned sequences and other properly formatted sequence info as well, but to some extent our hands are tied by the Biomart format. For now....
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