Why isn the Biology Workbench being improved?
The Biology Workbench currently is not being funded; it is being maintained by a very small portion of one person’s time as a service to the community. There is a proposal in its initial stages to obtain funding to completely rewrite the Workbench and use it as a framework to do many more things than the current Biology Workbench, but even if funding is obtained it will be a while before it is ready for public consumption. • Why is it difficult or impossible to import large sequences, or a large number of smaller sequences? This is because the Biology Workbench was originally designed for work with protein sequences, and the large (>100K bp) nucleotides create problems for the Biology Workbench core. An import of a large number of sequences can also cause the same problems. Even if the Biology Workbench program could handle large sequences, few of the tools in the Biology Workbench are useful for genomic analysis, so in general one should be doing genomic analysis with other services.
