NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/bionet/molbio/genbank/653

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-27 | 1.7 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!biosci!lhc!object!ostell
From: [e-mail] (Jim Ostell)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: Re: A continuing mis-use of misc_feature?
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Date: 26 Jan 93 19:16:17 GMT
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The ASN.1 is available from a number of sources. If you have the Entrez
software and CDROM from NCBI, you can pull down the "Options" menu when
you have a list of sequence titles on screen from a query and select
"Sequence ASN.1". Then double click on the title line you want to see.
If you select "GenBank" from the same menu, you will see the entry in
GenBank flatfile format. This just runs the tognbnk() function provided
in the NCBI software toolkit on the ASN.1 entry. The data on the Entrez:
Sequences CDROM is stored in (Huffman compressed) ASN.1.  The tognbk()
function is how we make the GenBank flatfile release itself from the
ASN.1 stored internally at NCBI.

A selected entry can be stored as disk file in ASN.1 by selecting the
Sequence ASN.1 option and then using the Save or Save As choices from
the File menu.  The NCBI Software Toolkit (available by anonymous ftp
from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov -- in toolbox/ncbi_tools/ncbi.tar.Z) has a number
of demo programs that will read ASN.1 data and function calls to
retrieve data from the Entrez:Sequences CDROM if you want to write
your own applications. Sadly, the documentation for the toolkit is way
out of date. It is being rewritten even as we speak and at least some
of the new documentation will be available for ftp quite soon.

 Jim Ostell
 NCBI