DDBJ (DNA Data Bank of Japan) began DNA data bank activities in earnest in 1986 at the National Institute of Genetics (NIG). From the beginning, DDBJ has been functioning as one of the International DNA Databases, including EBI in Europe and NCBI in the USA as the two other members. Consequently, we have been collaborating with the two data banks through exchanging data and information on Internet and by regularly holding two meetings, the International DNA Data Banks Advisory Meeting and the International DNA Data Banks Collaborative Meeting. DDBJ is the sole DNA data bank in Japan, which is officially certified to collect DNA sequences from researchers and to issue the internationally recognized accession number to data submitters. We collect data mainly from Japanese researchers, but of course accept data and issue the accession number to researchers in any other countries. Since we exchange the collected data with EMBL/EBI and GenBank/NCBI on a daily basis, the three data banks share virtually the same data at any given time. We also provide worldwide many tools for data retrieval and analysis developed by at DDBJ and others. ... [Information of the supplier]
Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery. Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved. We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, on our Awards page, or go directly to our Results page. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
