A collaboration is ongoing with Dr. L. Staudt, NCI, on the discovery of novel human Lymphoid-specific genes by automated DNA sequencing of subtracted cDNA libraries. Software tools developed by DCRT are used to process and place the data into a SYBAS relational database system. These include tools for prescreening cDNA sequence against a local database, automating searching against the non-redundant databases on the NCBI network BLAST server, providing for the display of the results allowing user interaction to select information to be placed into the SYBASE database. To date, approximately 1500 cDNA sequences have been analyzed yielding homologies to a variety of proteins including transcriptional regulators, signal transduction proteins and membrane receptors. Efforts to develop and refine methods for automating motif pattern matching and database analysis, and to incorporate laboratory management information and data from other sources such as northern blots into the SYBASE database continue.
