COLIBRI - A FUNCTIONAL DATA-BASE FOR THE ESCHERICHIA-COLI GENOME

Several data libraries have been created to organize all the data obta ined worldwide about the Escherichia coli genome. Because the known da ta now amount to more than 40% of the whole genome sequence, it has be come necessary to organize the data in such a way that appropriate pro cedures can associate knowledge produced by experiments about each gen e to its position on the chromosome and its relation to other relevant genes, for example. In addition, global properties of genes, affected by the introduction of new entries, should be present as appropriate description fields. A data base, implemented on Macintosh by using the data base management system 4th Dimension, is described. It is constr ucted around a core constituted by known contigs of E. coli sequences and links data collected in general libraries (unmodified) to data ass ociated with evolving knowledge (with modifiable fields). Biologically significant results obtained through the coupling of appropriate proc edures (learning or statistical data analysis) are presented. The data base is available through a 4th Dimension runtime and through FTP on Internet. It has been regularly updated and will be systematically lin ked to other E. coli data bases (M. Kroger, R. Wahl, G. Schachtel, and P. Rice, Nucleic Acids Res. 20(Suppl.):2119-2144, 1992; K. E, Rudd, W . Miller, C. Werner, J. Ostell, C. Tolstoshev, and S. G. Satterfield, Nucleic Acids Res. 19:637-647, 1991) in the near future.