With respect to the most useful & convenient system for sequence analysis,
Has anyone compared the anticipated rate of DNA and protein sequence
acquisition vs. the type of available information storage?
1. The amount of data in GenBank, EMBL etc. must be going up rapidly,
and someone must be projecting this into the future.
2. The capacity of storage media is going up, and the price per
capacity is going down.
These two trends could resolve in several ways -
There might be so much sequence information that local computers
would not be able to handle the storage, and we would all have
to rely on the big facilities for searching, homologies, etc.
The improvement in data storage and its lowered price might
reach the point where PCs and Macs could reasonably handle
all the required tasks, including storage of all sequence data.
Has anyone projected these kind of thoughts for 5 years from now, as
opposed to what is the optimum system for the size of GenBank right
now.
Russell Malmberg
russell at dogwood.botany.uga.edu
