Now scientists are beginning to sequence all 3 billion or so base pairs of nucleotides that constitute human genes. Knowing this sequence is expected to make it easier for scientists to understand genetic causes of diseases and to develop treatments. But first scientists need to decode the sequence. The information spilling out of DNA sequencers amounts to an unannotated stream of data. Like a message written in an unknown language, the sequence offers few clues about which proteins a particular gene codes for, and whether or not a gene actually codes for a protein.
Some genes act like punctuation in a sentence to mark the beginning and end of a sequence.
Others are duplicates or broken and unusable genes. Still others have functions that are unknown. Scientists also need an easy means of accessing these data, something which Biology Workbench's uniform computing environment can provide. Some experts predict that by the project's end in 2002 there will be enough data to fill 200 volumes, each the size of the Manhattan phone book. A less direct benefit from the workbench's inclusion in the Human Genome Project is its potential to expose more scientists to this kind of Web-based technology.