In article <Dp6IC0.2CJ at hermes.hrz.uni-bielefeld.de>,
friedric at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de (Friedrich Ackermann) wrote:
?> Dear Netters,
?>
?> I am putting together a list of topics I want to present
?> in a seminary called "`Informatik in der Molekularbiologie"'
?> (german translation of "`Molecular Bioinformatics"' or
?> "`Computing for Molecular Biology"').
?> Among the topics I have found to be interesting there is
?> a program called MOLGEN by M. Stefik (see for example
?> Stefik, M., Planning with Constraints (MOLGEN: Part 1),
?> Artificial Intelligence 1981(16), 111-140 or the dicussion in
?> Schulze-Kremer, S., Molecular Bioinformatics, Berlin 1996).
?> Since I am working on the protein docking problem I am not an
?> expert neither for Artificial Intelligence nor for cloning experiments
?> (the application domain of MOLGEN).
?>
?> Therefore I would appreciate any answers on the following questions:
?>
?> 1. Is MOLGEN still in use? Can it be downloaded? Ist it
?> supported by an institution or do commercial versions exist?
?> What are the current versions? How do they differ from the
?> originally described ones?
?>
?> 2. Do any successors of MOLGEN or other programs with a
?> similar application goal exist? (Remark: MOLGEN's goal is
?> to develop automatically plans for producing genetically
?> modified bacteriums using methods from Artifical Intelligence.)
?> Where can they be found? Which references should be read?
?>
?> Beside this any hints about lists of topics or curriculae for molecular
?> bioinformatics are appreciated.
?>
?> Best regards,
?> Friedrich Ackermann
hmm, a couple of years ago i threw away all my aritificial intelligence-
related papers ;-)
most AI projects in the life sciences were "demonstration" projects
which were not actually used much by the people in the field (despite inflated
claims to the contrary from some AI people; dendral springs to mind
immediately; crysalis looked promising but was never used in any
real cases as far as i know; the stanford protein nmr system is used
mostly in stanford i think; etc etc)
i seem to remember vaguely that molgen was actually marketed commercially,
probably by IntelliGenetics (which, i further seem to remember, was bought
up by another company a few years ago); whether or not it was a success
i don't know - maybe a web or literature search will help you further
--gerard
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Gerard J. Kleywegt
Department of Molecular Biology, Biomedical Centre
Uppsala University, Uppsala, SWEDEN
