A high performance grid-web service framework for the identification of 'conserved sequence tags'

The continuous increasing of computing power in biological research places a threshold to the single host use and suggests an approach based on distributed computing. An emerging solution is grid technology, which allows organization to make better use of existing computing resources by providing them with a single, transparent, aggregated source of computing power. Equally, bioinformatics analysis often involves many web services, allowing shared access to information and helping the biologist to design, describe, record complex experiments. A new generation of grid infrastructure, where web services are building blocks, allow managent of a web services workflow. This work shows a tool for the identification and functional annotation of ‘Conserved Sequence Tags’ (CSTs) through cross-species genome comparisons, deployed on a Grid System Architecture, based on Web Services concepts and technologies. c © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.