Dear all: SeqHound v3.0 is available for download now from http://www.blueprint.org/seqhound/api_help/seqhound_help_guides.html. Major changes to this release include a port to a MySQL database backend allowing users to install a virtually free bioinformatics-programming platform in-house using instructions provided in the SeqHound Manual. The remote API (available in Java and Perl) is now supported by a FastCGI server for even faster response times. We are interested in identifying developers who are already using SeqHound. If you are, please sign up for the seqhound.usergroup email list at http://lists.blueprint.org/mailman/listinfo/seqhound.usergroup. Feedback and discussions on future development are welcome at this list. Best regards, Ian Ian Donaldson, Ph.D. Manager of Bioinformatics Software Development The Blueprint Initiative - North America 522 University Ave. Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 1W7 http://blueprint.org ian.donaldson at blueprint.org About SeqHound SeqHound is a freely available bioinformatics database warehouse resource. Over 300 Gigabytes of data are collected, integrated and updated from around the world on a nightly basis. Sources include the National Center for Biotechnology Information and the Gene Ontology Consortium. Programmers have unrestricted access to up-to-date data via a remote Application Programming Interface (API) written in Perl, Java, C and C++. Over 150 function calls allow access to the complete collection of GenBank, RefSeq and SwissProt sequences, 3-D structures, precomputed protein neighbours, redundancies and conserved domain analyses. Users may also access collected sequence annotations including taxonomy, Gene Ontology assignments and PubMed links. All functions are fully documented and tested on a daily basis. The Blueprint SeqHound server is supported by a redundant architecture (failover load-balancers, failover servers and, failover SANs) for complete fault protection against component failure and to ensure rapid response time. SeqHound encourages unrestricted 24x7 calls to its servers, to allow programmers rapid, uninterrupted, access to biological data on a global basis. SeqHound services over 700,000 hits per day. All SeqHound code is freely distributed under the GNU Public License. Find SeqHound at www.blueprint.org.