Search

The article presents a description of the "search and match" (SAM), a computer program for data processing which is unusually simple, versatile and flexible, and which we believe may prove useful to other biological scientists. It suggests that SAM creates and maintains the file, the other accepts requests and searches the file, attempting to satisfy those requests for data on Escherichia coli. It reports that the data that SAM processes consist of strain descriptions identified by unique strain numbers. It mentions that SAM can be used to scan any set of descriptive data, sorting out those descriptions that have designated properties in common and assigning numerical values to the degree of correspondence among descriptions.