Chemistry International
Vol. 21, No.2, March 1999
1999, Vol. 21
No. 2 (March)
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Chemistry International
Vol. 21, No. 2
March 1999
News
from IUPAC
Bioinformatics
and the Internet
Dr. Jürgen Pleiss and Professor
Rolf D. Schmid, Chairman and Titular Members of the IUPAC Commission
on Biotechnology (Institute for Technical Biochemistry, University of
Stuttgart, Allmandring 31, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany; e-mail: [email protected];
[email protected]),
contributed the following article on the combination of two new technologies
that are having a major impact on the pharmaceutical, agrochemical,
and food industries.
Introduction
At the turn of the millennium, two young technologies can be singled
out which have a major impact on science, industry, and society: recombinant
DNA and information technology. As they combine in the field of bioinformatics,
they are transforming the pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and food industries
and, as a consequence, university education. Much of today's information
in the life sciences is generated by collaborative efforts at different
locations worldwide, and effective communication is essential for
success. Thus, the huge amount of data generated by large-scale genome
sequencing activities, e.g., the human genome project, depends heavily
on computing and telecommunications and stimulates further efforts
in this area.
Explosive
Growth of the World Wide Web
In information technology, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become the
dominant global communication network. It is based on the Internet,
which has served already for more than 20 years as a communication
resource among scientists. But only when the hypertext transfer protocol
(HTTP) was introduced in 1990 did communication via the Internet became
sufficiently easy and inexpensive to allow its general use. Moreover,
HTTP is hardware-independent and thus accessible even through inexpensive
personal computers which are connected directly to the Internet or
via a modem to an Internet provider.
This development has stimulated all kinds of commercial activities,
and the number of Internet hosts and Internet web sites has reached
nearly 40 and 4 million (Fig.
1: Number of Internet hosts advertised in the DNS - Internet Domain
Survey, July 1998, http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/report.html),
respectively1.
At present, the number of web sites doubles every year, 100 million
people worldwide are estimated to be active Internet users, and business
on the order of USD 8 billion is done via the Internet. It is expected
that within two more years the number of active users might increase
tenfold to reach 1 billion, a dramatic increase driven mainly by the
populous Asian nations, and that Internet-based sales will account
for USD 300 billion or 1% of all global sales within only four years.
Life
Sciences and the World Wide Web
Though by now a majority of the 4 million web sites have a commercial
background, the scientific use of the WWW will increase as well. Among
the initiatives to enhance its quality and speed up transfer of large
volumes of data, the Internet2 project is the most ambitious. It will
start by mid-1999 with 141 participating universities and 14 companies
across the United States. The Internet2 will serve exclusively scientific
purposes and "facilitate and coordinate the development, deployment,
operation, and technology transfer of advanced, network-based applications
and network services to further U.S. leadership in research and higher
education and accelerate the availability of new services and applications
on the Internet"2.
Even now in the era of Internet commerce, many thousands of WWW
sites are devoted to the global science network. In fact, many recent
discoveries and developments, particularly in the life sciences, would
be unthinkable without the Internet. The modern era of life sciences
started in the 1950s and accelerated in the early 1970s, when the
modern tools of genetic engineering were developed, i.e., how to isolate,
sequence, and clone DNA and express it in a host organism of one's
choice. In those early days, DNA sequencing was cumbersome and restricted
to single genes, minor gene clusters, or small virus genomes. In order
to store the resulting DNA sequences, the National Biomedical Research
Foundation, Washington, DC, USA, created the first sequence databank
in 1965.
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