The central role of sequence data in molecular biology leads to a crucial need to access the most recent releases of the sequence databases to analyse sequences with efficient programs and to compare them with these databases. BISANCE (Fondrat et al., 1986) was created in 1983 with the support of the ''Ministere de la Recherche'' as a national service for access to nucleic acid and protein sequences databases (EMBL: Cameron, 1988; GenBank: Bilofsky and Burks, 1988; NBRF-PIR: Sidman et al., 1988). Until now, BISANCE has been running on a DPS8-Bull at the CIT12 computing centre (Paris). This project has been continuously developed and now > 300 accounts, mostly in the national area, use the system through the telephone or TRANSPAC networks. It offers a great variety of analysis programs to the molecular biology community. The users are mostly from the public research centres (CNRS, INSERM, INRA, etc.) or universities, but a significant number are from industry or commercial research centres. For some months the system has been moving to a VAX/VMS 8530. This new computer allows a better integration in the networks (access to EARN, development of EMBNET with EMBL) and the use of new programs.