In article <6m8bnh$9t$1 at pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>, tjrc1 at mole.bio.cam.ac.uk
(Tim Cutts) wrote:
> In article <alouka-1706981303520001 at 129.240.54.170>,
> Andrew S. Louka <alouka at writeme.com> wrote:
> >I was sent a demo of Sequencher (http://www.genecodes.com), and was
> >thinking seriously about "defecting" from GCG to Sequencher, but haven't
> >seen it mentioned in this thread. Haven't people heard of Sequencher, or
> >are there other reasons? New software of this calibre is rather
> >expensive, so I value feedback from other experienced users.
>> My impression was that Sequencher was good value for smaller groups;
> GCG becomes much better value when you are talking about large numbers
> of researchers; this machine has one licence for GCG, but nearly 1,500
> users. This equates to just a few tens of dollars per user per year
> (including paying my salary to run the machine and provide support,
> and paying for the machine itself, which is a lot faster than a
> desktop machine would be).
>> So for larger scale companies and universities, GCG starts to look
> very cheap compared to desktop-machine based tools.
>> Having said that, there are still free alternatives to most of the
> component parts of GCG, but you lose the integration and consistency
> of user interface (which in my opinion is the single most important
> point in GCG's favour)
>While Sequencher is great for assembling contigs and other tasks related
to the production of final, error checked sequence data, it is far from a
complete analytical package. Also Sequencher is relatively expensive (at
approx. $2000/simultaneous user), but can be used in larger venues via a
network-based hardware key.
As Tim mentioned there have been free programs available to do nearly
everything that is available through GCG, but you sacrifice the integrated
user interface which provides entree into sequence data analysis for many
benchtop researchers.
--
Jerry Learn <Learn at u.washington.edu>
U. of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-7740 USA
