Departments of Biomedical Engineering1, Medicine2, and Pharmacology 3,
Stanley B. Higgins, Daniel Martin Watterson · 1988
The construction of a completely synthetic gene offers the most flexible way to synthesize a protein (smaller than - 50,000 molecular weight) with any desired features which are frequently required in the investigation of the structure/functi on relationship of proteins, and is among the newly emerging technologies. The design process of synthetic qane experiments involves a large amount of information, such as the deoxyribonucleotide sequences (primary structure of genes) and amino acid sequences (the primary structure of proteins), the codon table (the relation between the DNA triplets and amino acids), restriction endonuclease map (mapping of restriction endonuclease sites in a gene sequence), and so on. The ambiguity derived from the reverse translation (conversion of amino acids to proper DNA triplets) further increases the complexity of the design process. These processes may require researchers to spend weeks or months to complete an experimental design. A prototype system which is able to manage the information and guide biologists towards a workable experiment design has been developed. The domain knowledge in the field is incorporated into the system by using a knowledge-based expert system shell, LISP, and C procedural routines on a SUN workstation. An intelligent, graphical user interface has been developed with the system to ease biologists' interaction with the workstation. The system may reduce the experiment design process to hours. The preliminary feedback from the biologists exercising the system is very favorable.