The rapid pace of bioscience research makes it very challenging to track relevant articles in ones area of interest. MEDLINE, a primary source for biomedical literature, offers access to more than 20 million citations with three-quarters of a million new ones added each year. Thus it is not surprising to see active research in building new document retrieval and sentence retrieval systems. We present Ferret, a prototype retrieval system, designed to retrieve and rank sentences (and their documents) conveying gene-centric relationships of interest to a scientist. The prototype has several features. For example, it is designed to handle gene name ambiguity and perform query expansion. Inputs can be a list of genes with an optional list of keywords. Sentences are retrieved across species but the species discussed in the records are identified. Results are presented in the form of a heat map and sentences corresponding to specific cells of the heat map may be selected for display. Ferret is designed to assist bio scientists at different stages of research from early idea exploration to advanced analysis of results from bench experiments.