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