ORTIGAO@dulruu51.bitnet (06/13/89)
Ulm, 13-May-1989
Dr. Christian Overton
Unisys Paoli Research Center
Subj. Bio-Matrix'89 meeting
Dear Dr. Overton,
we are very much interested in attending the Bio-matrix
meeting, therefore I'm sending beneath an abstract we would like to consider
for presentation. We at Sektion Polymere, concerned mainly with chemical
oligonucleotide chemistry, after setting up a interdisciplinary group,
have started constructing a database over chemically synthe-sized genes and
would like to expand it. But before doing so, I fell it is very important
for us present this idea to the collegues in the field, without
their feedback the necessary effort would be in vain.
Yours sincerely
Flavio Ortigao
Sektion Polymere
Universitaet Ulm
D-7900 Ulm, West Germany
E-mail: Ortigao@dulruu51
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Database on Chemially Synthesized Oligonucleotides
F. Ramalho Ortigao, G. Groeger, H. Seliger, H. Steil*, and J. Vogt+
Sektion Polymere, *Rechenzentrum fuer Forschung und Lehre, and +Sektion fuer
Spektren- und Strukturdokumentation, University of Ulm, D-7900 Ulm, West
Germany
Chemically synthesized oligonucleotides are increasingly applied in almost
all branches of biomedical science. They enable the construction of synthe-
tic genes for natural and artificial peptides, the isolation of genes not
clonable by other techniques, the diagnosis of genetic diseases, the iden-
tification of pathogen organisms, and the exogeneous control of gene ex-
pression.
In spite of the tremendous impact in genetic engineering, sequence data
from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, either as probes or as
synthetic genes, have not been systematically retrieved in established
databases. On the other hand the electronic availability of such data
would enormously facilitate the work of a rapidly increasing number of
research groups in this field. These data would not only help in mini-
mizing duplicate work, but also would permit rapid comparison of dif-
ferent approaches. Moreover they would support the design of better
sequences, since different probes against the same target might differ
widely in their performance.
Concious of the considerations mentioned above and the fact that keeping
pace with the rapidly increasing large amount of information, which will
be contributed by chemical oligonucleotide synthesis, will be a harder
task in future, we started to establish a database for this field.
The database, which is implemented on a VAX 8600 computer system,
contains bibliographic and structural informations about published che-
mically synthesized genes. Following the CODATA recommendations the
entries are organized without hierarchical structure in a flat file.
For the this permits the import of our data and further processing.
It is our aim to expand the scope of our database to encompass all
available chemically synthesized oligonucleotides from refereed papers.
Ref.: G. Groeger, F. Ramalho Ortigao, H. Steil, and H. Seliger:
Nucleic Acid Research 16 (1988) 7763.