Significant parts of biological knowledge are available only as unstructured text in articles of biomedical journals. By automatically identifying gene and gene product (protein) names and mapping these to unique database identifiers, it becomes possible to extract and integrate information from articles and various data sources. We present a simple and efficient approach that identifies gene and protein names in texts and returns database identifiers for matches. It has been evaluated in the recent BioCreAtIvE entity extraction and mention normalization task by an independent jury.