Martin Frith | PubMed Health

PubMed2003

Theatre: A software tool for detailed comparative analysis and visualization of genomic sequence.

Theatre is a web-based computing system designed for the comparative analysis of genomic sequences, especially with respect to motifs likely to be involved in the regulation of gene expression. Theatre is an interface to commonly used sequence analysis tools and biological sequence databases to determine or predict the positions of coding regions, repetitive sequences and transcription factor binding sites in families of DNA sequences. The information is displayed in a manner that can be easily understood and can reveal patterns that might not otherwise have been noticed. In addition to web-based output, Theatre can produce publication quality colour hardcopies showing predicted features in aligned genomic sequences. A case study using the p53 promoter region of four mammalian species and two fish species is described. Unlike the mammalian sequences the promoter regions in fish have not been previously predicted or characterized and we report the differences in the p53 promoter region of four mammals and that predicted for two fish species. Theatre can be accessed at http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/Registered/Webapp/theatre/.

Animals↗

PubMed2003

SeqVISTA: a graphical tool for sequence feature visualization and comparison.

BACKGROUND: Many readers will sympathize with the following story. You are viewing a gene sequence in Entrez, and you want to find whether it contains a particular sequence motif. You reach for the browser's "find in page" button, but those darn spaces every 10 bp get in the way. And what if the motif is on the opposite strand? Subsequently, your favorite sequence analysis software informs you that there is an interesting feature at position 13982-14013. By painstakingly counting the 10 bp blocks, you are able to examine the sequence at this location. But now you want to see what other features have been annotated close by, and this information is buried several screenfuls higher up the web page. RESULTS: SeqVISTA presents a holistic, graphical view of features annotated on nucleotide or protein sequences. This interactive tool highlights the residues in the sequence that correspond to features chosen by the user, and allows easy searching for sequence motifs or extraction of particular subsequences. SeqVISTA is able to display results from diverse sequence analysis tools in an integrated fashion, and aims to provide much-needed unity to the bioinformatics resources scattered around the Internet. Our viewer may be launched on a GenBank record by a single click of a button installed in the web browser. CONCLUSION: SeqVISTA allows insights to be gained by viewing the totality of sequence annotations and predictions, which may be more revealing than the sum of their parts. SeqVISTA runs on any operating system with a Java 1.4 virtual machine. It is freely available to academic users at http://zlab.bu.edu/SeqVISTA.

Amino Acid Sequence↗