Brutlag, D. L., & Kristofferson, D. (1988). In R. R. Colwell (Ed.), Biomolecular Data: A Resource in Transition (pp. 287-294.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University Medical Center,
California 94305 and Intelligenetics Inc., Mountain View California
94040.
Bionet is a computer network for molecular biologists and is run as a
non-profit resource for the scientific community by IntelliGenetics
Inc. Bionet is funded by the NIH Division of Research Resources and
provides scientists access to numerous biological sequence databases
and to software tools required to analyze. these data (Nucleic Acids
Res. 14, 17-20, 1986: Nature 325, 555-556, 1987). Another major goal
is to provide a means for electronic communications between
scientists to encourage collaborations. Bionet also serves as a
central facility for development and distribution of novel software
in the area of molecular biology and develops methods for distributed
computing.
In addition to the two major nucleic acid sequence databases from
GenBank and the EMBL DNA database, Bionet provides access to the PIR
protein sequence database, the Cold Spring Harbor restriction enzyme
database, the Brookhaven protein structure database, the VectorBank
of restriction maps of vectors, phages and vIruses, a compendium of
known oncogenes and Lindsley and Grell's Genetic variations of
Drosophila melanogaster. Thus on this single resource we have
information at several levels of biological function immediately
available to the researcher.
The service component of Bionet has been successful as judged by the
number of laboratories using the facility (over 500) and the total
number of scientists using the software (nearly 2000). The primary
attraction of Bionet is the ready availability of welt supported
software and databases. Molecular biologists routinely use Bionet to
compare their most recent DNA or protein sequences against the
currently available sequences. While 1000 complete searches are
processed each month on Bionet, nearly 3000 searches of subsets of
the database are also performed. The other analytical software Is
accessed nearly 10,000 times per month by various Bionet users. Its
22 communications ports are very often full at peak hours and the
Bionet community uses considerably more than the 50% of the CPU
cycles of a DEC 2065 which is allotted to it by the Bionet Grant.
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