A common philosophy and FORTRAN 77 software package for implementing and searching sequence databases

I present a common philosophy for implementing the EMBL and GENBANK (BBN-Los Alamos) nucleic acid sequence databases, as well as the National Biological Foundation (Dayhoff) protein sequence database. The associated FORTRAN 77 fully transportable software package includes: 1) modules for implementing each of these databases from the initial magnetic tape file, 2) modules performing a fast mnemonic access, 3) modules performing key-string access and allowing the definition of user-specific database subsets, 4) a common probe searching module allowing the stacking of multiple combined search requests over the databases. This software is particularly suitable for 32-bit mini/microcomputers but would eventually run on 16-bit computers.