Life's Library

The post war years were a golden era in molecular biology. In 1956 Frederick Sanger was the first to establish the order of amino acids of a protein. That protein was the hormone Insulin. Crick and Watson had discovered the structure of DNA only a few years earlier. The progress in determining protein sequences was slow until the mid 1970's when the same Frederick Sanger (amongst others) developed methods for the rapid sequencing of DNA.

A DNA sequence can be translated directly into the amino acid sequence of its protein. The ability to sequence DNA lead rapidly to an immediate increase in the number of protein sequences resolved. Central databases were established in Europe, the USA and Japan to collect this sequence information from individual scientists and make it available to other researchers.

The escalation in the volume of protein sequence data is continuing. The database has doubled in size in only three years. It now contains over 75,000 sequences!