Introduction to the Workshop
URLs Provided by Attendees

Abstracts

Mapping

Informatics

Sequencing

Instrumentation

Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues

Infrastructure

The electronic form of this document may be cited in the following style:
Human Genome Program, U.S. Department of Energy, DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop IV, 1994.

Abstracts scanned from text submitted for November 1994 DOE Human Genome Program Contractor-Grantee Workshop. Inaccuracies have not been corrected.

MacAce: ACeDB on the Macintosh

Frank H. Eeckman
Human Genome Center, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720

Richard Durbin
Sanger Centre, Hinxton, Great Britain

Cyrus Harmon
M.C.B. Dept., U.C. Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720

We have ported ACeDB (R. Durbin and J. Thierry-Mieg) to the Macintosh. Both 68k and native powerPC versions exist. ACeDB is an object oriented database-display system originally developed for the C. elegans genome project (A C. elegans DataBase). ACeDB was originally written for UNIX and X windows. It is now in use in over 20 different genome projects, including Arabidopsis, Yeast, Drosphila, MycoBacterium, and Human.

ACeDB consists of a core data manager, specific application code, and a GUI library. Porting ACeDB to the Macintosh was largely restricted to writing a Macintosh specific version of the GUI library. We also added some multimedia capabilities to MacAce, taking advantage of image (PICT2) and movie standards (QuickTime) specific to the Macintosh platform.

In ACeDB, data are stored in objects that are organized in classes. The objects have an extendible tree-like structure, so that arbitrarily large amounts of information can be stored in them. That information may include annotations of various sorts, comments, cross-references, and, in MacAce, PICT2 images and QuickTime movies. The schema specifying data structures can be extended during the lifetime of the database. There is a browser mode and a general search facility to provide maximal flexibility.

MacAce can output displays in Postscript and Quickdraw for laser printing or in plain text (ASCII) for transfer to other sources. MacAce is now in use in over 30 laboratories worldwide.