Integrated databanks access and sequence/structure analysis services at the PBIL

The World Wide Web server of the PBIL (Pôle Bioinformatique Lyonnais) provides on-line access to sequence databanks and to many tools of nucleic acid and protein sequence analyses. This server allows to query nucleotide sequence banks in the EMBL and GenBank formats and protein sequence banks in the SWISS-PROT and PIR formats. The query engine on which our data bank access is based is the ACNUC system. It allows the possibility to build complex queries to access functional zones of biological interest and to retrieve large sequence sets. Of special interest are the unique features provided by this system to query the data banks of gene families developed at the PBIL. The server also provides access to a wide range of sequence analysis methods: similarity search programs, multiple alignments, protein structure prediction and multivariate statistics. An originality of this server is the integration of these two aspects: sequence retrieval and sequence analysis. Indeed, thanks to the introduction of re-usable lists, it is possible to perform treatments on large sets of data. The PBIL server can be reached at: http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr.