DEVELOPMENT OF A DIRECTORY OF GENETIC PROBES AS A SHARED INSTITUTIONAL RESOURCE

This report describes design and implementation of a genetic probe dir ectory database for use by researchers in a medical school. The purpos e of the database is to allow researchers to exchange descriptive info rmation concerning probes available in their laboratories in order to facilitate collaboration, The Genetic Probe Database Browser (GPDB) al lows multi-field constraints and wildcard searches of the database, e- mail upload and download of data, and provides simple database adminis trator tools, The GPDB is implemented in C under the UNIX operating sy stem, and uses the 'Curses' character terminal package to provide acce ss to users unable to use modern graphical user interfaces. Currently, 10 researchers have contributed approximately 250 genetic probes, and several research collaborations have been started because of this res ource.