INTERNET-BASED SUPPORT FOR BIOSCIENCE RESEARCH - A COLLABORATIVE GENOME CENTER FOR HUMAN-CHROMOSOME-12

This paper describes an approach that provides Internet-based support far a genome center to map human chromosome 12, as a collaboration bet ween laboratories at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York, and the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Co nnecticut. Informatics is well established as an important enabling te chnology within the genome mapping community. The goal of this paper i s to use the chromosome 12 project as a case study to introduce a medi cal informatics audience to certain issues involved in genome informat ics and in the Internet-based support of collaborative bioscience rese arch, Central to the approach described is a shared database (DB/12) w ith Macintosh clients in the participating laboratories running the 4t h Dimension database program as a user-friendly front end, and a Sun S PARCstation-2 server running Sybase. The central component of the data base stores information about yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs), eac h containing a segment of human DNA from chromosome 12 to which genome markers have been mapped, such that an overlapping set of YACs (calle d a ''contig'') can be identified, along with an ordering of the marke rs. The approach also includes 1) a map assembly tool developed to hel p biologists interpret their data, proposing a ranked set of candidate maps, 2) the integration of DB/12 with external databases and tools, and 3) the dissemination of the results. This paper discusses several of the lessons learned that apply to many other areas of bioscience, a nd the potential role for the field of medical informatics in helping to provide such support.