Databases in molecular biology: a CODATA task group at work.

A certain concern exists that the exponential growth of nucleic acid and protein sequence data will saturate the channels of data acquisition, distribution and utilization on the one hand and, on the other hand, that even the actual resources are still not fully and easily accessible to any bench scientist. Despite the stake of the scientific community at large in the fundamental data collected in this field, there has been in past years only a modest effort to discuss the common problems at an international level. Three international meetings were organized in 1987 on this subject: the annual meeting of CODATA Task Group on Coordination of Protein Sequence Data Banks (Nice, France, January 1987), the EMBL/NIH Workshop concerned primarily with nucleic acid databases (Heidelberg, FRG, February 1987) and the CODATA Workshop on Nucleic Acid and Protein Sequencing Data (Gaithersburg, USA, May 1987).