DNA Data Bank of Japan in the age of information biology

DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) began its activities in 1986 in collaboration with EMBL in Europe and GenBank in the United States. DDBJ developed a data submission tool called Sakura, by which researchers can submit their newly sequenced data on WWW from every corner of the world. The data bank also built a database management system (Yamato II), incorporating the techniques and functions of the object-oriented database, in order to efficiently process the data it has collected. A number of research activities in information biology are also going on at DDBJ. Two such activities are also briefly introduced in this report.