table design question

Hello All,

I need some advice regarding table column types and read speeds.
I have a database of protein sequence data (strings of characters mostly
including 20 alphabet characters) and nucleotide base sequence
data (strings of characters mostly including a,t,g,c).

When I wrote the homegrown backend to our database way back when, I cooked
up some fun ways of storing the data for very fast access speeds (not really
interested in doing SQL-ish searching on the columns in place).

I'm wondering what the best choice of storage is: just leave them as text
strings, do some fancy hexidecimal conversion, etc? Or does it matter? The
tables for the most part contain the sequence information as well as a
primary key.

Any thoughts/suggestions would be useful.

Happy Holidays (oh ... darn ... it's going to be 60's and sunny AGAIN on the
peninsula today [nudge to back-east bretheren] heheh)

George Johnson