While they have concentrated on computational experiments, they have more support for laboratory and observational experiments than we do. Within the mainstream of database research, semantic and object-oriented data modeling are important because of the importance of representing complex scientific objects independently of any physical schema. Research on personal databases and laboratory notebooks is relevant because of the interplay between an individual scientist's private databases and laboratory-wide or public databases. It also provides one of the most productive, since all major genetic science publications now require researchers to publish their sequences electronically and the human genome project set aside a considerable percentage of funding for bioinformatics research. Between 1985 and 1989 the number of nucleotides in centralized DNA databases increased 7-fold, from 3 to 21 million.
Some researchers contend that data is currently accumulating at near exponential rates.
The Human Genome project and the Brookhaven Protein Database are perhaps the most ambitious of these public database projects, but there are a number of other genome-related databases. Thus computer scientists interested in scientific data and program operability have available a wide range of publicly available data and programs to work with. These databases usually also provide interfaces for data entry of new sequences by researchers and for validation of those entries by the database administrator. Heterogeneous molecular biology databases. Workstations for molecular biologists.