How does BioBike go beyond typical biological knowledegbases?
Online bioloigical data or knowledge bases (of which there are zillions!) are very useful for simple lookup sorts of work, but they typically operate in a “vending machine” model: You put in a query, and you get out an answer. If you’re lucky, you can do some pre-packaged computations in the database, and maybe even do them on multiple results from a query. If that’s all you need to do, great! BioBike is a full fledged efficent programming language embedded in an integrated knowledge base — all totally web-accessible. This is a completely different animal than the vending-machine sort of knowledge bases you’re probably used to. Instead of using web commands you use programming language constructs, and you can pass the results of one computation on to the next (like in any sort of programming languages), which allows you to combine operations. Moreover, BioBike has built-in all of the typical bioinformatic tools (Blast, Clustal, etc.) so that not only can you do your own computations i
