We have developed an application to calculate double-stranded DNA fragment size on an agarose gel. This application is named GEL and is implemented for two different platform: MS-DOS and Macintosh. Both implementations allow entry of the relative migration distance of a DNA fragment of an agarose gel containing up to 20 different wells and up to 20 bands per well. Up to three different standards can be present on the gel, and the application will use the closest standard to calculate the fragment size. Both applications have a familiar user interface: the Turbo Vision interface for the MS-DOS implementation and the familiar Macintosh interface for the Macintosh implementation. In addition, the MS-DOS implementation has an extensive context on-line help.

We have developed a Pascal system to compare microbial populations from different ecological sites using microcomputers. The values calculated are: the coverage value and its standard error, the minimum similarity and the geometric similarity between two biological samples, and the Lambda test consisting of calculating the ratio of the mean similarity between two subsets by the mean similarity within subsets. This system is written for Apple II, IBM or compatible computers, but it can work for any computer which can use CP/M, if the programs are recompiled for such a system.