P Durand, Canard, L and Mornon, JP (1997), "Visual BLAST and visual FASTA: graphic workbenches for interactive analysis of full BLAST and FASTA outputs under MICROSOFT WINDOWS 95/NT.", Comput Appl Biosci, 13, 4: 407-13.
Abstract: MOTIVATION: When routinely analysing protein sequences,
detailed analysis of database search results made with BLAST and
FASTA becomes exceedingly time consuming and tedious work, as the
resultant file may contain a list of hundreds of potential homologies.
The interpretation of these results is usually carried out with a
text editor which is not a convenient tool for this analysis. In
addition, the format of data within BLAST and FASTA output files makes
them difficult to read. RESULTS: To facilitate and accelerate this
analysis, we present for the first time, two easy-to-use programs
designed for interactive analysis of full BLAST and FASTA output files
containing protein sequence alignments. The programs, Visual BLAST and
Visual FASTA, run under Microsoft Windows 95 or NT systems. They
are based on the same intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) with
extensive viewing, searching, editing, printing and multithreading
capabilities. These programs improve the browsing of BLAST/FASTA
results by offering a more convenient presentation of these results.
They also implement on a computer several analytical tools which
automate a manual methodology used for detailed analysis of BLAST and
FASTA outputs. These tools include a pairwise sequence alignment
viewer, a Hydrophobic Cluster Analysis plot alignment viewer and a tool
displaying a graphical map of all database sequences aligned with
the query sequence. In addition. Visual Blast includes tools for
multiple sequence alignment analysis (with an amino acid patterns
search engine), and Visual FASTA provides a GUI to the FASTA program.
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