Report on the collaborative project
between ICOT and the NIH
Richard J. Feldmann
Division of Computer Research and Technology
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland 20892
The collaborative project between ICOT and the NIH must be considered at sev-
eral levels. At the highest level the project is meant to provide a vehicle for developing
friendship and understanding between Japanese and American scientific workers. By
means of visits to each others laboratories, by almost daily fax and e-mail messages we
have begun to understand each other's ways of thinking.
Two specific scientific projects were used as the scientific substrate for the project:
Genetic Information Processing and Protein Folding.
The Genetic Information Processing work is very much influenced by the ICOT
style of logic programming. This work is being done also in collaboration with workers
at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab-
oratory (LBNL). Over the last year and a half, four workshops have been held. The
emergence of the InterNet means that workers can come together in one physical place
to meet and talk but still use the computers and databases in their own laboratories.
A very graphical interface and database program, called GenoGraphics, has developed
from these workshops. GenoGraphics which is the work of Ross Overbeek and Ray
Hagstrom from ANL, started with the data representation of George Michaels (NIH)
on the E. coli genome and the work of Kaoru Yoshida (ICOT and LBNL) and Cassan-
dra Smith (LBNL) on human chromosome 21. The E. coli data was collected by Ken
Rudd who is now a member of the National Center for Biomedical Communication
and Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the NIH. Dr.
Michaels has just recently held such a workshop at the NIH. Workers from all over the
USA and from England came together to increase the range of genomes which can be
handled by GenoGraphics. During this workshop the genome for yeast pombe collected
by the workers at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) laboratory in London,
England was introduced into the GenoGraphics logic programming data format. The
ICRF workers had spent almost half a year developing programs and organizing their
data. During the week-long workshop they were successful in transferring their data
to logic programming format.
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