An Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) is a sequence of the 5' or 3' end of a
cDNA that is used to rapidly identify genes in the genome. Millions of
ESTs have been generated from a variety of tissues and developmental
stages in humans. As more ESTs are generated, searching a specific gene
sequence has become more and more inefficient and slow. Thus, it is of
paramount importance to identify genes specifically expressed in a
particular tissue, e.g., the human eye tissue, map them in the human
genome, and provide general information relevant to this specific gene.
The goal of this thesis is to develop an efficient database system to
store eye-specific EST information and to provide this information to
biological researchers in a convenient format. Accordingly, we carried out
the following tasks: design and implementation of the eye EST database
using Oracle; and design and implementation of the following online search
applications: Similarity Search, Map Position Search, and General
Information Search. We applied the Oracle relational database in the
project, utilized SQL for datamining, generated dynamic web pages to query
the database for data, and customized the display using Perl and CGI.
In conclusion, the web-based EST database system developed in this thesis
should allow researchers to quickly find eye disease genes using a variety
of different search techniques.