On Jul 7, 2006, at 11:26 PM, Srinivas JONNALAGADDA wrote:

> JS: Several of the biological and chemical databases compiled by NCBI
>     use ASN.1 format. For backward compatibility, they also provide  
> flat
>     files. However, for newer software, ASN.1 format is recommended.

People who offer data like this usually regret it when they discover  
how few ASN.1 tools there are. I've *never* found a decently- 
performing free general-purpose ASN.1 reader; there are a few that  
you can find, but they're typically buggy, slow, and usually fail on  
the dataset that you're interested in. -Tim