EuroTcl

The European Tcl/Tk User Meeting 2008 see http://www.eurotcl.org/ will be held in IGBMC, Illkirch Strasbourg, France June 6-7 2008

Presentation from Raymond Ripp

Biology studies are no more possible without intensive use of computers and databases.

In our Laboratory of Integrative BioInformatic and Genomics (LBGI) we developped, in Tcl/Tk, the tools allowing the analysis and management of the huge amount of heterogeneous data produced locally or by numerous worldwide bioinformatic centers. It concerns various types of data such as genomic sequences, from single protein to whole genomes (3.4 GigaBases for the human genome) with their complex associated information stored in flat files, html pages or more or less well structured databases as well as sets of experimental results or data treaments such as transcriptomics data, comparison searches, multiples alignments, image processing, etc. This necessitated the development of high throughput data retrieval, analysis and data mining tools, graphical interfaces and displays as well as specific databases and websites.

After a brief description of this context we will present our Tcl/Tk developments made since 10 years by around 15 people including biologists and students with very often minor background in programming languages. Tcl is easy to learn and allow to make progress quickly.