MERLIN (Methane Remote Sensing LIDAR Mission) is a joint DLR/CNES mission, which will measure column densities of methane in the atmosphere. The laser's optical bench, at the core of the instrument's transmitter, is developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology and features technologies which enable high-stability laser performance operation in space conditions. Those technologies were demonstrated for the first time in the frame of the FULAS project and were adapted for MERLIN. This paper will present evidence of the technology's capability to support long lifetime missions, of the achievement of high pointing, energy and spectral stabilities based on representative breadboard campaigns and of the technology maturity for space based on subassembly and component level.

MOTIVATION: Computer-assisted studies of structure, function and evolution of viruses remains a neglected area of research. The attention of bioinformaticians to this interesting and challenging field is far from commensurate with its medical and biotechnological importance. It is telling that out of >200 talks held at ISMB 2013, the largest international bioinformatics conference, only one presentation explicitly dealt with viruses. In contrast to many broad, established and well-organized bioinformatics communities (e.g. structural genomics, ontologies, next-generation sequencing, expression analysis), research groups focusing on viruses can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. RESULTS: The purpose of this review is to increase awareness among bioinformatics researchers about the pressing needs and unsolved problems of computational virology. We focus primarily on RNA viruses that pose problems to many standard bioinformatics analyses owing to their compact genome organization, fast mutation rate and low evolutionary conservation. We provide an overview of tools and algorithms for handling viral sequencing data, detecting functionally important RNA structures, classifying viral proteins into families and investigating the origin and evolution of viruses.