My Grid is an e-Science Grid project that aims to help biologists and bioinformaticians to perform workflow-based in silico experiments, and help them to automate the management of such workflows through personalisation, notification of change and publication of experiments. In this paper, we describe the architecture of my Grid and how it will be used by the scientist. We then show how my Grid can benefit from agents technologies. We have identified three key uses of agent technologies in my Grid: user agents, able to customize and personalise data, agent communication languages offering a generic and portable communication medium, and negotiation allowing multiple distributed entities to reach service level agreements.

UNLABELLED: Data in the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database is traditionally available in a flat file format that has a number of known shortcomings. With XML rapidly emerging as a standard data exchange format that can address some problems of flat file formats by defining data structure and syntax, there is now a demand to distribute EMBL data in an XML format. XEMBL is a service tool that employs CORBA servers to access EMBL data, and distributes the data in XML format via a number of mechanisms. AVAILABILITY: Use of the XEMBL service is free of charge at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/xembl/, and can be accessed via web forms, CGI, and a SOAP-enabled service. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Information on the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database is available at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/. The EMBL Object Model is available at http://corba.ebi.ac.uk/models/. Information on the EMBL CORBA servers is at http://corba.ebi.ac.uk/

While the number of sequenced genes is increasing dramatically, the number of different protein structural families is expected to be more limited. Changes in enzymatic activity or protein interactions can dramatically modify the role of homologous proteins in different organisms or mutants. However, experimental data associated with sequences or mutations stored in databases are often limited to a short description of the enzymatic pathway, molecular interaction or phenotype associated with the changes in amino acid sequence. In the alpha/beta-hydrolases fold database ESTHER, we are experimenting with links between experimental kinetic data and sequences, mutations and protein structures. This effort will lead to the integration of pharmacological data with genome-wide databases.

It is known that while the programs used to predict genes are good at determining coding nucleotides, there are considerable inaccuracies in the determination of the gene structural elements. Among them, the most notable is that of the exact boundaries of exons. In order to assess this, we had earlier reviewed various programs that predict potential splice sites and exons. The results led to the following two observations: (i) a high proportion of false positive splice sites from computational predictions occur in the vicinity of real splice sites; and (ii) current algorithms are misled to predict wrong splice sites more often when the coding potential ends within +/-25 nucleotides from real sites than when it ends at farther positions. In this report, we review decision tree models for human splice sites and the resultant software tool, namely SpliceProximalCheck, that discriminates such'proximal' false positives from real splice sites. Further presented is an integrated system (MZEF-SPC) with Splice ProximalCheck (SPC) as a front-end tool operating on the results of Michael Zhang's exon finder program. Examination of the output of the integrated program on an illustrative gene set revealed that as much as 61 of 93 MZEF-predicted false positive exons could be eliminated by SPC for a loss of only 3 out of 33 MZEF-predicted true positive exons.