The genome reconstruction manager: a software environment for supporting high-throughput DNA sequencing.

A new software system designed for use in high-throughput DNA sequencing laboratories is described. The Genome Reconstruction Manager (GRM) was developed from requirements derived from ongoing large-scale DNA sequencing projects. Object-oriented principles were followed in designing the system, and tools supporting object-oriented system development were employed for its implementation. GRM provides several advances in software support for high-throughput DNA sequencing: support for random, directed, and mixed sequencing strategies; a novel system for fragment assembly; a commercial object data-base management system for data storage; a client/server architecture for using network computational servers; and an underlying data model that can evolve to support fully automatic sequence reconstruction. GRM is currently being deployed for production use in high-throughput DNA sequencing projects.