DNA DATA-BANK OF JAPAN IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION BIOLOGY

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) began its activities in 1986 in collabor ation with EMBL in Europe and GenBank in the United States. DDBJ devel oped a data submission tool called Sakura, by which researchers can su bmit their newly sequenced data on WWW from every corner of the world. The data bank also built a database management system (Yamato II), in corporating the techniques and functions of the object-oriented databa se, in order to efficiently process the data it has collected. A numbe r of research activities in information biology are also going on at D DBJ. Two such activities are also briefly introduced in this report.