Recent years have seen an
explosive growth in biological data. Large sequencing projects are producing
increasing quantities of nucleotide sequences. The contents of nucleotide
databases are doubling in size approximately every 14 months. The latest release
of GenBank (V.131) exceeded two billion base pairs. Not only the size of
sequence data is rapidly increasing, but also the number of characterized
genes from many organisms and protein structures doubles about every two
years. To cope with this great quantity of data, a new scientific discipline
has emerged: bioinformatics,
biocomputing or computational biology