What does NCBI do? "Established in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information, NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information - all for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease."

There are a lot of Linux/FLOSS resources on this site, both programs and data. Here's a sample from the FTP site:



BLAST Basic Local Alignment Search Tool - For stand-alone sequence comparison software.

Cn3D - Stand-alone software for viewing structures in three dimensions.

Data Repository - Download collections of contributed molecular biology data.

GenBank - Download the full release database or daily updates.

Genome Assembly/Annotation Projects - Download complete genomes/chromosomes, contigs and reference sequence mRNAs and proteins.

NCBI Toolbox - NCBI software tools for building bioinformatics resources.

Have a look at this site, even if you're not likely to need to run any DNA sequences through their pattern-matching software or download any genome databases. I think you'll be amazed at what's being done at this level with Linux.