Development of software tools at BioInformatics Centre (BIC) at the National University of Singapore (NUS)

There is burgeoning volume of information and data arising from the rapid research and unprecedented progress in molecular biology. This has been particularly affected by the Human Genome Project which is trying to completely sequence three billion nucleotides of the human genome (1),(1a). Other genome sequencing projects are also contributing substantially to this exponential growth in the number of DNA nucleotides and proteins sequenced. The number of journals, reports and research papers and tools required for the analysis of these sequences has also increased. For this the life sciences today needs tools in information technology and computation to prevent degeneration of this data into an inchoate accretion of unconnected facts and figures. The recently formed BioInformatics Centre (BIC) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) provides access to various commonly used computational tools available over the World Wide Web (WWW)--using a uniform interface and easy access. We have also come up with a new database tool. BioKleisli, which allows you to interact with various geographically scattered, heterogeneous, structurally complex and constantly evolving data sources. This paper summarises the importance of network access and database integration to biomedical research and gives a glimpse of current research conducted at BIC.