Desktop Sequence Analysis Software

Few biological fields have benefited from technological advances as much as genomics. The field could not be where it is today without progress in automated sequencing methods and in software to interpret, annotate, and manage the voluminous data that these automated sequencers churn out. Without this latter development, researchers would be hard pressed to read and understand these gigabytes of data--the equivalent of having an encrypted encyclopedia without a deciphering key. (See related sto

Written byJeffrey Perkel

| 11 min read

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Like sequencing technologies themselves, sequence analysis software has evolved substantially from its original incarnation. In the 1980s, before graphical operating systems became standard, these packages primarily consisted of small, command line-based applications. The "GCG^® Wisconsin Package™," developed by Genetics Computer Group (GCG) at the University of Wisconsin, was a popular suite of such utilities. Unfortunately, using a variety of separate applications to perform various tasks is tedious, and it is possible that one program will not be able to read the output of another program.

But times have changed. Disparate command line-based utilities have, for the most part, been replaced by highly integrated applications with graphical user interfaces. The Wisconsin Package, now offered by San Diego-based Accelrys, currently consists of over 140 separate applications, according to Kevin Kendall, desktop applications product manager at Accelrys. But many users now interact with it through a Web interface, called SeqWeb, which hides the ...

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