Using the Molecular Biology Data

Introduction The goal of this article is to introduce the most important of the different molecular biology databases available to researchers. Recent advances in technology have resulted in an information explosion. This has risen the challenge of providing an integrated access method to these data, capable of querying cross-referenced but highly heterogeneous databases. The SRS (Etzold, Ulyanov et al. 1996) system has emerged to deal with these problems and has became a powerful tool in modern biotechnology research. The chapter is organized in two main sections. The first section gives an overview of the following groups of databases: • bibliographic, • taxonomic, • nucleic acid, • genomic, • protein and specialized protein databases, • protein families, domains and functional sites, • proteomics initiatives, • enzyme/methabolic pathways. The second section describes the SRS approach to integrate access to these databases and some recent developments at the EBI SRS server (http://srs.ebi.ac.uk).