What is the purpose of the .DEF and .DBS files and how important are they?
A .DEF file defines all the experimental information of a particular experiment file. If it is a fingerprint file, each .DEF file represents one gel. If it is another type, e.g. character type it will hold the information of all experiments that were imported during one import process. It can maximally contain 300 experiments. When the entries in a .DEF file are linked to database entries, the file also contains the keys to the database entries for each experiment in the file.
A .DBS file contains the keys and the information fields for a set of database entries (min. 1; max. 300). If the key of a certain database entry is the same as for an experiment in a .DEF file, the software will link this experiment to the entry; i.e. that experiment belongs to the entry.