Submission and retrieval of an aligned set of nucleic acid sequences

An important part of many studies published in the Journal of Phycology is the construction and analysis of an alignment of related nucleotide sequenc es, These alignments are valuable to other investigtors, especially when th e data provide a basis for more than one possible alignment. Publication of alignments, however, is prohibitively expensive, and the data are difficul t to retrieve and use in this form, Several electronic archives for these a lignments now exist, and information is provided here on the submission and retrieval of alignments at the National Center for Biotechnology Informati on (NCBI), the European Bioinformatics' Institute (EBI), and TreeBASE. Emph asis is placed on the use of Sequin and Entrez at the NCBI, because these p rograms have been modified recently and they provide a fluid and integrated system to submit and retrieve sequence and alignment records and related i nformation, Other useful features of Entrez (e.g. free Medline searches) ar e noted.