Charlie <cckim at stanford.edu> wrote:
> I really like Vector NTI for cloning, but I hate the price. We have it on
> a Keyserver here at Stanford, but the nuisances of waiting for checked out
> keys and not being able to work from computers off campus are ... well ...
> nuisances.
> I've been toying with the idea of an open source project to put together
> some molecular biology software similar to Vector NTI.
You are quite right: There is NO usable (for wet-lab researcher) free
equivalent to VectorNTI/Lasergene/... up to now. I have been thinking
about starting a project a couple of times but never found the time to
actually do it. The main result of my WEB searching and thinking about
how I would go about that is this:
The UNIX/LINUX/GNU/OSS community has plenty of great programs to offer
to the bioinformaticist. But there is NO sequence editor that deserves
the name! If I were to start the project I'd begin with the editor
(which needs to be much better than the one that comes with Lasergene!).
The next step would be to make it an interface to EMBOSS which would add
huge amounts of functionality without having to write much code. I guess
the best would be to have the pull-down menues highly configurable so
you can add new command line tools without hassle. There are GUI
projects for EMBOSS but neither of them included a decent editor and
without one the whole GUI seems pretty useless.
just my 2 cents...
cu
Philipp
--
Dr. Philipp Pagel Tel. +49-89-3187-3675
Institute for Bioinformatics / MIPS Fax. +49-89-3187-3585
GSF - National Research Center for Environment and Health
Ingolstaedter Landstrasse 1
85764 Neuherberg
Germany
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