MicroGenie: Introduction and Restriction Enzyme Analysis

The MicroGenie program was originally developed as a result of a collaboration between Cary Queen of N.C.I. Bethesda and Laurence Korn of Stanford University, Their first program was written for a Mainframe computer (1 ). This program was later adapted to run on the, then new, IBM PC (2 ). A company called SciSoft Inc. was established to develop the program, and it was marketed worldwide by Beckman Instruments Inc. The program had an interface that was outstandingly user-friendly for the time, with full context-sensitive help. A system of data compression, which coded three DNA bases into a single eight-bit byte, enabled data sequences of up to a million nucleotides to be stored and searched on a 360-Kbyte floppy disk. A password system was provided to enable individual workers to store their databases of sequences in separate directories on a hard disk and to access portions of the data bank selectively. In response to the growth of the GenBank DNA database, the data bank sequences were later released on CD-ROM disks; the extra capacity allowed annotation information as well as sequence to be included. In 199 1, Beckman Instruments ceased to distribute MicroGenie, and an agreement was made with IntelliGenetics Inc. to continue the distribution of the GenBank and PIR databases in MicroGenie format. Further development of the MicroGenie programs stopped, although Beckman Instruments continued to provide support on the program software.