Bioinformatics has become indispensable to all fields in the life sciences. Its importance and impact to both theoretical and applied biology cannot be overestimated. The rapid progress of genome projects has brought a vast accumulation of molecular biological information in the past decade. Millions of nucleic acid sequences with billions of bases have been deposited in EMBL, GenBank and DDBJ. Both SwissProt and PIR form the basis of annotated protein sequence database together with TrEMBL and GenPept which are computer translated sequence entries from EMBL and GenBank, Hundreds of specialist databases have been derived from the above primary sequence databases, such as TRANSFAC (gene regulation sites and transciption factors), Vector (DNA cloning vectors), EPD (eukaryotic promoters), PROSITE (protein motif sites), BLOCKS (protein alignments), PRINTS (protein fingerprints), REBASE (restriction enzymes.) Special web servers for model systems such as GoldenPath and ENSEMBL have been actively developed.
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