Abstract

Bioinformatics is a developing science. It contributes greatly to gene research projects like the human genome project and is extremely helpful in drug discovery. Future advances in bioinformatics will be enhanced by how fast gene sequences are produced and selected. This report describes the internet infrastructure for analysing DNA sequences developed for the Centre for Structural and Functional Genomics at Concordia University. It describes the architecture, the technologies, and integration techniques used. We make use of a web server and three machines to build the system. The system integrates Unix and Perl scripts as well as the Apache web server with its security modules. There are three subsystems: clone, pipeline, and web search. Clone takes care of system storage, backup and recovery. Pipeline extracts results from the sequencers to submit to the search engine and stores the results. Web search accepts search requests using a web interface to a Perl CGI. The searches use BLAST against the Non-Redundant (NR) sequence database from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).