CBB seminar 11 AM, Tuesday March 7, 2000
        NIH Bldg. 38A, 8th floor conference room


Detlef D. Leipe
The NCBI taxonomy database - structure, philosophy, applications,
future developments.


ABSTRACT
The NCBI taxonomy database is a relational database that primarily
1. stores the scientific names of all organisms that have
   been sequenced and
2. provides a hierarchical classification of these organisms
   that strives to reflect phylogeny (i.e., the tree of life).
The NCBI taxonomy database is curated by five in-house scientists and
it provides the taxonomy to the NCBI, the collaborating database
EBI/EMBL, and DDBJ and SWISSPROT. The NCBI database currently contains
about 65000 species, and the number doubles about every two years.
I will give a general introduction to the curation of the taxonomy
database, discuss some of the problems and limitation and will
conclude with a preview of some of the tools that are devloped to take
more advantage of the taxonomic information when formulating BLAST
queries and viewing BLAST results. Work is also underway to provide an
ENTREZ type taxonomy interface and I hope to also show a preview of 
that.