title: Integrating sequence and structural biology with DAS.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a network protocol for exchanging biological data. It is frequently used to share annotations of genomes and protein sequence.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Here we present several extensions to the current DAS 1.5 protocol. These provide new commands to share alignments, three dimensional molecular structure data, add the possibility for registration and discovery of DAS servers, and provide a convention how to provide different types of data plots. We present examples of web sites and applications that use the new extensions. We operate a public registry of DAS sources, which now includes entries for more than 250 distinct sources.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our DAS extensions are essential for the management of the growing number of services and exchange of diverse biological data sets. In addition the extensions allow new types of applications to be developed and scientific questions to be addressed. The registry of DAS sources is available at http://www.dasregistry.org.
authors.affiliation: The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. ap3@sanger.ac.uk
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Prlić
authors.forename: Thomas A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Down
authors.forename: Eugene
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kulesha
authors.forename: Robert D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Finn
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kähäri
authors.forename: Tim J P
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Hubbard
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002874:Chromosome Mapping / Q000379:methods; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D017421:Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*; D018511:Systems Integration; D014584:User-Computer Interface