Sequence Alignment Servers

zPicture is an interactive Web-based sequence alignment and visualization tool for dynamically generating conservation profiles and identifying evolutionarily conserved regions (ECRs). zPicture is highly flexible, because critical parameters can be modified interactively, allowing users to differentially predict ECRs in comparisons of sequences of different phylogenetic distances and evolutionary rates.

YASS is a program to perform DNA local alignment (it's a DNA similarity search tool) of genomic sequences in fasta or plain format.

PLOTREP, a tool designed to post-process results obtained by sequence similarity search and merge fragments belonging to the same copy of a repeat. The software allows rapid visual inspection of the results using a dot-plot like graphical output.

<BR> PARALIGN is a rapid and sensitive similarity search tool for the identification of distantly related sequences in both nucleotide and amino acid sequence databases. Two algorithms are implemented, accelerated Smith-Waterman and ParAlign. The ParAlign algorithm is similar to Smith-Waterman in sensitivity, while as quick as BLAST for protein searches. A form of parallel computing technology known as multimedia technology that is available in modern processors, but rarely used by other bioinformatics software, has been exploited to achieve the high speed. The software is also designed to run efficiently on computer clusters using the message-passing interface standard.

<BR> MATRAS server has three main services. The first one is a pairwise 3D alignment, which is simply align two structures. A user can assign structures by either inputting PDB codes or by uploading PDB format files in the local machine. The second service is a multiple 3D alignment, which compares several protein structures. This program employs the progressive alignment algorithm, in which pairwise 3D alignments are assembled in the proper order. The third service is a 3D library search, which compares one query structure against a large number of library structures.

<BR> LAGAN, a system for rapid global alignment of two homologous genomic sequences, and Multi-LAGAN, a system for multiple global alignment of genomic sequences.LAGAN and Multi-LAGAN compare favorably with other leading alignment methods in correctly aligning protein-coding exons, especially between distant homologs such as human and chicken, or human and fugu. Multi-LAGAN produced the most accurate alignments, while requiring just 75 minutes on a personal computer to obtain the multiple alignment of all 12 sequences. Multi-LAGAN is a practical method for generating multiple alignments of long genomic sequences at any evolutionary distance.

<BR> Dotter is a graphical dotplot program for detailed comparison of two sequences. Here, every residue in one sequence is compared to every residue in the other sequence. The first sequence runs along the x-axis and the second sequence along the y-axis. In regions where the two sequences are similar to each other, a row of high scores will run diagonally across the dot matrix. If you're comparing a sequence against itself to find internal repeats, you'll notice that the main diagonal scores maximally, since it's the 100% perfect self-match. Dotter provides a tool to explore the visual appearance of this landscape, as well as a tool to examine the sequence alignment it represents. These tools are explained below.

<BR> CrossLink is a versatile tool for the exploration of relationships between RNA sequences. After a parametrization phase, CrossLink delegates the determination of sequence relationships to established tools (BLAST, Vmatch and RNAhybrid) and then constructs a network. Each node in this network represents a sequence and each link represents a match or a set of matches. Match attributes are reflected by graphical attributes of the links and corresponding alignments are displayed on a mouse-click. The distributions of match attributes such as E-value, match length and proportion of identical nucleotides are displayed as histograms. Sequence sets can be highlighted and visibility of designated matches can be suppressed by real-time adjustable thresholds for attribute combinations.

<BR> SIM4 addresses the problem of efficiently aligning a transcribed and spliced DNA sequence (mRNA, EST) with a genomic sequence containing that gene, allowing for introns in the genomic sequence and a relatively small number of sequencing errors.

<BR> MGAlign is a novel, rapid, memory efficient and practical method for aligning mRNA/EST and genome sequences. Besides the alignment itself, this web service allows users to effectively visualize the alignment in a graphical manner and to perform limited analysis on the alignment output. The server also permits the alignment to be saved in several forms, both graphical and text, suitable for further processing and analysis by other programs.