EMBnet News bulletin of 24-Jul-2000

Laurent Falquet Laurent.Falquet at isrec.unil.ch
Mon Jul 24 11:48:19 CEST 2000


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* EMBnet News bulletin of 24-Jul-2000 *
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Dear EMBnet users,

We would like to announce several changes in our services:

- enhanced BLAST server
- new and updated databases
- new services Hits, ClustalW
- courses september 2000, march 2001
- deprecation of embnet-tech

*****

Enhanced BLAST server

Since a few months the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Swiss
Center for Scientific Computing collaborate on implementing a more powerful
BLAST server.

This server is now available and runs on a 6 processor HP computer.
On the average, it is about twice as fast as our previous BLAST server. The
programs who have gained most in speed are tblastn and blastx (about
5-fold). Moreover, the new server is more stable and can handle more
simultaneous
requests than our previous server.

The EMBnet-CH BLAST pages have not changed, but we are planning an enhanced
version in the near future.

*****

New and updated databases

Release 63 of EMBL is now available on our servers.
This release contains 6,760,113 sequence entries comprising 8,255,674,441
nucleotides. This represents an increase of about 35% over Release 62. We
continue to update our databases on a weekly basis.

We have added links to the Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD) and to
the InterPro database of annotated protein domains.


*****

New services: Hits and ClustalW

Two new services are accessible through our web pages:

- The "Hits" web forms (maintained by SIB-ISREC) allow users to access a
precomputed database of protein patterns, profiles and HMMs occurring in all
protein database entries. This is an extremely useful tool for the
exploration of motifs occurring in multiple proteins.

- The multiple sequence alignment program ClustalW is also available on a
web page maintained at EMBnet.ch

We plan to add more support for these services in the future.

*****

EMBnet Courses

The 5th edition of our introductory sequence analysis course will be held in
the beginning of September 2000. As usual, the number of registrations is
higher than the maximum number of participants we can accommodate (40). We
apologize to those who will not be able to attend this year, and will
welcome them in a later edition of the course.

We plan to give an advanced course on DNA chips and microarrays in March
2001.
This course will deal with preparing and analysing data for and from those
new devices.

We can accommodate only a limited number of participants so be prepared to
fill in the registration form before the deadline!


*****

Elimination of the embnet-tech mailing list


Following our survey results and the data on usage of the embnet-tech
mailing list, we arrived to the conclusion that is not useful and decided to
remove it.
All the users of this list will be transferred to embnet-news.


Best regards,

Laurent Falquet






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