Work is ongoing to develop and provide an integrated framework for computational support of research in comparative DNA/protein sequence analysis and related areas across multiple genomes/species. The logic programming language PROLOG is used throughout this project, permitting data of disparate types to be combined rapidly and effectively, and permitting complex queries from the integrated data. Toolset development was performed in close collaboration with Drs. Ross Overbeek and R. Hagstrom of Argonne National Laboratory. Current work focuses on the addition of large volumes of data from multiple sources, resulting in a unique resource, combining data from a number of current sources such as GenBank, EMBL, Prosite, SwissProt, and others, including metabolic data from Dr. Overbeek's Russian collaborators. This will form an integrated database with DNA and protein sequence data, peptide motif dta, metabolic pathway data, and other data across multiple genomes. The work incorporates analysis of genomic organization and genetic regulation of metabolic pathways. This database and associated tools will permit answers to queries that are difficult or impossible to satisfy using the standard biological databases that are available. This database is also the underlying data repository for a World Wide Web (WWW) hypertext browswer implemented by R. Taylor and A. Ginsburg of DCRT/BIMAS. It is expected that this WWW service will provide a unique resource to the biomedical community over the Internet, employing simple and widely available end-user client tools, such as Netscape, for access. This will supplement present WWW servers at NCBI and at EMBL in Europe, providing unique services unavailable to date.
