Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on February 13, 2009
Bioinformatics 2009 25(7):958-959; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp086
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CGAS: comparative genomic analysis server
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-0814, Japan
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Summary: Comparative approach is one of the most essential methods for extracting functional and evolutionary information from genomic sequences. So far, a number of sequence comparison tools have been developed, and most are either for on-site use, requiring program installation but providing a wide variety of analyses, or for the online search of user's sequences against given databases on a server. We newly devised an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)-based system for comparative genomic analyses, CGAS, with highly interactive interface within a browser, requiring no software installation. The current version, CGAS version 1, provides functionality for viewing similarity relationships between user's sequences, including a multiple dot plot between sequences with their annotation information. The scrollbar-less draggable interface of CGAS is implemented with Google Maps API version 2. The annotation information associated with the genomic sequences compared is synchronously displayed with the comparison view. The multiple-comparison viewer is one of the unique functionalities of this system to allow the users to compare the differences between different pairs of sequences. In this viewer, the system tells orthologous correspondences between the sequences compared interactively. This web-based tool is platform-independent and will provide biologists having no computational skills with opportunities to analyze their own data without software installation and customization of the computer system.
Availability and Implementation: CGAS is available at http://cgas.ist.hokudai.ac.jp/.
Contact: watanabe{at}ist.hokudai.ac.jp
Associate Editor: Alex Bateman
Received on September 30, 2008; revised on February 10, 2009; accepted on February 11, 2009