There are various folks working on the concept of separating the
user interface from the analysis programs, and I think this is be
a useful approach to making such programs easier to use.
Of course web interfaces abound now for various individual
analyses. There are GCG-web interfaces, and GCG company has one
soon to release (and will sell it for an arm/leg).
My own work in progress SeqPup takes this approach - use the analysis
software you need, whether GCG, Clustal, tacg, fastdnaml, etc...,
running on your own workstation or on a server computer. GCG's SeqLab
is something like this (but requires XWindows), and Martin Senger at
EMBL is working on a general CORBA interface to seq. analysis software.
Peter Rice's EMBOSS (at sanger.ac.uk) will be a freely distributable set of
analysis programs, but as I understand with commandline (or maybe
GCG style character mode prompting) interfaces. Some other programs
specializing in user interface like SeqPup, web forms or java applets
can be the front-end to such.
I can't especially recommend SeqPup now if you need a smooth product,
but it is improving. I suspect some of the other good user-interface
programmers out there will have software out soon along these lines.
There is a company in Ohio (Netgenetics?) that may have a like product
out soon (it will be commercial). There is a company called MAG
that has a product LOOK which while originally focused on molecular
modelling + some protein functions, is moving toward gene analysis.
It is interesting, but also at arm+leg prices. GeneCodes' Sequencher
is pretty widely liked as easy to use and robust analysis of sequencing
data.
>In article <8DD3D27DC6A5D111823200A0C955FB4004CBA0 at drucker.niehs.nih.gov>,
>staffa at niehs.nih.gov ("Staffa.Nick") wrote:
>>< snip >
>>What DNA and Protein Analysis software are you aware of that would do
>>some of the things that GCG would do and perhaps be friendlier?
>>What do you know about it? How could I find out more? Would you recommend
>>it?
>--
-- d.gilbert--biocomputing--indiana-u--bloomington-in-47405
-- gilbertd at bio.indiana.edu
