Why is it so hard to submit a new sequence?

[Paula Burch]

Our users have been doing pretty well with the Authorin 3.0 program,
but it has a bug that is making it very difficult to prepare a 
certain sequence submission. Unfortunately, no bugs are going to
be fixed in Authorin in the future, as it's no longer supported
by the folks who wrote it, at Intelligenetics, and no one else
is willing to pick up right where they left off.

Now I'm checking out the Annotator's Workbench for Solaris.
It's sufficiently nonintuitive that I really don't want to inflict
it on any of our less computer-friendly scientists, and would
kind of prefer to leave it alone myself. (Evidently it's designed
to make it easy to annotate existing sequences, which presumably led
to a lot more program than we really want for simply entering a new 
sequence.)

How hard does it have to be, just to fill out a few simple forms 
electronically? We need something *simple* to encourage sequence 
submission by the hoards of scientists out there who still aren't 
too comfortable with spending hours in front of a computer. We
can't reasonably expect them to learn a whole new program for this 
purpose.

I hope that someone will alert me to a truly simple way to prepare a 
sequence for submission to GenBank or any other of the major databanks.

________________________________________________________________________
Paula E. Burch, Ph.D.           Molecular Biology Computational Resource
Baylor College of Medicine      phone: (713)798-6023  fax: (713)798-4279
Houston, Texas 77030                        internet: pburch at bcm.tmc.edu
http://mbcr.bcm.tmc.edu:8080/pburch.html