This award provides funds for the aquisition of a computer and related hardware and software that will serve the needs of a large, interdisciplinary group of investigators at the University of Georgia. Together with other equipment to be provided by the University, the computer will allow the investigators to work on a variety of problems such as enzyme structure and DNA sequence analysis, the latter especially as applied to the study of plant gene regulation. The new computer will both complement and supplant dated existing equipment which is both expensive to maintain and inadequate for some tasks described in the proposal. The effective use of computers has revolutionized current practice in many areas of biological science, and has virtually created others. The three-dimensional analysis of protein structure and the comparative analysis of DNA sequence data are two good examples of research that neccesitate extensive use of computation. The rapidity with which new, smaller and more powerful computers are being developed means that equipment purchased as recently as a few years ago may now be obsolete. Moreover, the development of networking devices means that a single computer can serve the needs of many users and give occasional users access to a relatively powerful machine whose purchase they could not justify individually.
