Worm Breeder's Gazette 8(2): 58

These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communication and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.

A Computer Program for Organizing a Clone Collection

J. Stein, S. Emmons

We have written a computer program for storage and retrieval of 
information about the recombinant DNA collection held by a laboratory. 
For each clone, information such as clone name, cloning vector, 
cloner, date cloned, notebook page, storage location, etc., is entered.
The cloned insert is identified by a serially-assigned fragment 
number and by a restriction map.  Wherever a given fragment occurs in 
the collection it is identified by its fragment number, and all 
restriction mapping data for that fragment is held together in a 
single storage location and kept updated.  Data regarding 
interrelationships among fragments in the collection, such as which 
are subclones of others, are also held.  The stored information can be 
searched and listed in a variety of ways.
The program is modular in design and can be readily modified and 
expanded.  It is written in Basic for a Dec RT-11 operating system (
PDP-11 computer or equivalent) and should be easily adaptable to other 
systems.  We encourage other laboratories to use it.  The program 
anticipates multiple laboratory use by prefixing each fragment number 
with a laboratory number.  By this means each cloned segment of the 
genome is given a unique name.  Eventually there will undoubtedly be a 
need for a centralized listing of information about cloned fragments 
of the C.  elegans genome.  We suggest that a centralized listing 
could be a subset of the information stored in laboratory based 
listings such as this one.  For a free interchange of information 
among laboratories and between laboratories and a centralized data 
base to be possible, a uniform system of nomenclature and computerized 
format will have to be adopted.  We have written this program in order 
to gain some experience with the use of a laboratory based data bank 
that hopefully will be helpful in designing a widely used system.  
Please contact us if you are interested in using this program.  We 
would be glad to help you adapt it to your computer system.