Researchers in Egypt have developed a technique to compress DNA sequences of the kind used in medical research so that they take up a lot less space in a computer database but without loss of information. The approach is described in detail in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications. Molecular sequence databases, such as those at EMBL, GenBank, ...

As letters of the alphabet spell out words, when amino acids are linked to one another in a particular order they "spell out" proteins. But sometimes the cell machinery for building proteins in our bodies makes a mistake and the wrong amino acid is inserted. The consequences can be devastating, resulting in a garbled protein that no longer has the correct function, possibly leading to ca...