Scriptable access to the Caenorhabditis elegans genome sequence and other ACEDB databases

Much of the world's genomic data are available to the community through net worked databases that are accessed via Web interfaces. Although this paradi gm provides browse-level access and has greatly facilitated linking between databases, it does not provide any convenient mechanism for programmatical ly fetching and intergrating data from diverse databases. We have created a library and an application programming interface (API) named AcePerl that provides simple, direct access to ACEDB databases from the Perl programming language. With this library, programmers and computer-savvy biologists can write software to pose complex queries on local and remote ACEDB databases , retrieve the data, integrate the results, and move data objects from one database to another. In addition, a set of Web scripts running on top of Ac ePerl provides Web-based browsing of any local or remote ACEDB database. Ac ePerl and the AceBrowser Web browser run on Unix systems and are available under a license that allows for unrestricted use and redistribution. Both p ackages can be downloaded from URL http://stein.cshl.org/AcePerl. A Microso ft Windows port of AcePerl is in the planning stages.