Jeffrey Perkel | Jun 6, 2004 | 1 min read
Biological databases typically tag their records with unique identifiers called accession numbers. These locators simplify record retrieval, but they are also database-specific, presenting a headache for bioinformaticians who want to map records in one database with their equivalents in another. Typically this is done manually, a tedious, error-prone task, especially when applied genome-wide.A few years ago, Robert Kincaid, a senior research scientist at Agilent Laboratories, Palo Alto, Calif.,