There is now a World Wide Web front end to the GenQuest (Q) server - an
integrated sequence comparison server. The purpose of the system is to
allow rapid and sensitive comparison of DNA and protein sequence to existing
DNA and protein sequence databases and the rapid retrieval of the full
database entries of any sequence found in the course of a search.
The databases which can be accessed from the Q server include:
The Genome Sequence Database (GSDB) - a daily updated DNA sequence
database maintained at The Los Alamos National Laboratory;
Swissprot - a protein sequence database;
Prosite - a library of protein motifs; and
PDB - Protein Databank sequences of proteins with solved structures.
The programs available to do the search include Smith-Waterman, Blast
and Fasta.
This WWW interface is running from the The Johns Hopkins University
BioInformatics Web Server while the searches use a specialized parallel
computing environment at The Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
You can access this service from the Home page of the Hopkins BioInformatics
Web server the URL for which is:
http://www.gdb.org/hopkins.html
To use this interface you'll need to have a WWW client with 'forms support',
some of which are:
NCSA Mosaic for X-Windows, version 2.0 or higher
Lynx - for Unix and VMS
NCSA Mosaic for the PC (Microsoft Windows) version 2.0-alpha-2 or higher.
The PC client is still a bit buggy - it may have problems with
the formats of results from searches.
It is rumored that a new release of NCSA Mosaic for the Macintosh (which will
have forms support) will be available in the not too distant future.
Hope you find this useful,
Dan Jacobson
danj at gdb.org
Johns Hopkins University
