BioInformatics

• BioBike (formerly named BioLingua)
  Application: BioBike is a novel concept in client-server programmability for computational biology and bioinformatics. Lisp is the most natural programming language in which to implement the symbolic computations that are crucial to modern systems biology. Lisp ability to manipulate code as data made the unique properties of BioBike very easy to implement. The ACL compiler and garbage collector are probably the best of any Lisp implementation; ACL code compares favorably against nearly every other non-C language, and often 10 times faster than the next nearest competitor. Franz has done a superb job with program-development tools, with packages to support important machinery such as threads, database access, and web server capabilities. BioBike is in use in a number of laboratories around the world. We strongly believe that the facilities that it offers in support of important biological science would not have been possible without a Lisp implementation of the quality of ACL.

• EcoCyc
  Application: Encyclopedia of E. coli Genes and Metabolism
  EcoCyc is a bioinformatics database that describes the genome and the biochemical machinery of E. coli. The long-term goal of the project is to describe the molecular catalog of the E. coli cell, as well as the functions of each of its molecular parts, to facilitate a system-level understanding of E. coli. EcoCyc is linked to other biological databases containing protein and nucleic-acid sequence data, bibliographic data, protein structures, and descriptions of different E. coli strains. In addition, the Pathway Tools software that underlies EcoCyc is not specific to E. coli, but has been applied to manage genomic and biochemical data for a variety of organisms.

• MDL Information Systems
  Application: MDL Information Systems uses Lisp and Allegro CL to help pharmaceutical companies create new drugs.

• Harvard Children's Hospital Informatics Program
  Application: SNPer -- Harvard's Children's Hospital Informatics Program uses Lisp and Allegro CL to power SNPer, a web-based application that provides scientists with a variety of tools that greatly speed up the analysis process of SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms). Using SNPper, scientists can now accomplish the same amount of work in a day that used to take weeks to complete.