COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR MOLECULAR BIOLOGY SEQUENCING AND GENETIC MAPPING

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Molecular biology relies increasingly on computer technology for protein and DNA sequence analysis, management of large databases, and worldwide communications, giving rise to the new term, molecular biology informatics. In large scale projects, such as sequencing an entire gene or a large virus, computers have become indispensable. CSL continued its collaboration with Dr. Craig Venter's Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology (LMCN) in NINDS. Dr. Venter's laboratory engages in sequencing regions of the X chromosome and Chromosome 4, and this year began projects to identify and characterize genes expressed in the brain (the cDNA Project with DOE) and to sequence the entire smallpox virus (with CDC). CSL contributes to these efforts by integrating the various computer workstations, software, and network resources and has begun to develop methods to process and archive the extremely large volume of data that LMCN will generate. Specific activities this year include beta testing the UNIX version of the Genetic Computer Group's (GCG's) sequence analysis software suite; evaluating a number of other sequence analysis software packages; installing a new fileserver; installing the Sybase database management system. During the coming year, CSL will concentrate on methods to process and archive extremely large volumes of sequence data, and help to make the technologies developed through this project available to other investigators at NIH. For example, we propose to obtain a "fast data finder" system, and make it available as a network sharable resource for high speed sequence searching.