
In the last few decades, advances in molecular
biology and the equipment available for research in this field have allowed
the increasingly rapid sequencing of large portions of the genomes of several
species. In fact, to date, several bacterial genomes, as well as those of some
simple eukaryotes (e.g., Saccharomyces
cerevisiae, or baker's
yeast) have been sequenced in full. The Human Genome Project, designed to
sequence all 24 of the human chromosomes, is also progressing. Popular
sequence databases, such as GenBank and EMBL, have been growing at exponential
rates. This deluge of information has necessitated the careful storage,
organization and indexing of sequence information. Information science has
been applied to biology to produce the field called Bioinformatics