ASAD-A Sequence Attribute Display tool

Keith Satterley1
1keith@wehi.edu.au, The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

ASAD is A Sequence Attribute Display tool. It is written as a set of Microsoft Excel macros. There is one base per cell and it builds on the familiar Excel interface to allow for the flexible and efficient display of attributes (hydrophobicity etc.) using similar colours and styles for one sequence or multiple aligned sequences. It provides tools which enable the user to quickly load a set of sequence(s) and using a user definable set of styles and base attribute values, display all bases in similar styles that have similar attribute values. The visual highlighting assists in manual evaluation of similarity between sequences or parts of the one sequence. Tools allow for making insertions or deletions, creating a consensus sequence, finding identical sequences (useful with large numbers of short sequences), graphing defined attributes along a sequence, calculating basic statistics either horizontally or vertically and changing the number of bases per line. ASAD can be accessed freely at ftp://ftp.wehi.edu.au/pub/biology/ASAD.