Whitney Joe, Esteban David J, Upton Chris
Department of Microbiology and Biochemistry, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, V8W 3P6, Canada.
BMC Bioinformatics. 2005 Feb 8;6:23. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-6-23.
Sequence similarity searching is a powerful tool to help develop hypotheses in the quest to assign functional, structural and evolutionary information to DNA and protein sequences. As sequence databases continue to grow exponentially, it becomes increasingly important to repeat searches at frequent intervals, and similarity searches retrieve larger and larger sets of results. New and potentially significant results may be buried in a long list of previously obtained sequence hits from past searches.
ReHAB (Recent Hits Acquired from BLAST) is a tool for finding new protein hits in repeated PSI-BLAST searches. ReHAB compares results from PSI-BLAST searches performed with two versions of a protein sequence database and highlights hits that are present only in the updated database. Results are presented in an easily comprehended table, or in a BLAST-like report, using colors to highlight the new hits. ReHAB is designed to handle large numbers of query sequences, such as whole genomes or sets of genomes. Advanced computer skills are not needed to use ReHAB; the graphics interface is simple to use and was designed with the bench biologist in mind.
This software greatly simplifies the problem of evaluating the output of large numbers of protein database searches.
序列相似性搜索是一种强大的工具，有助于在为DNA和蛋白质序列赋予功能、结构和进化信息的探索中提出假设。随着序列数据库继续呈指数级增长，频繁重复搜索变得越来越重要，并且相似性搜索检索到的结果集越来越大。新的潜在重要结果可能会被埋没在过去搜索中先前获得的一长串序列命中结果中。
ReHAB（从BLAST获取的近期命中结果）是一种在重复的PSI-BLAST搜索中查找新蛋白质命中结果的工具。ReHAB比较使用蛋白质序列数据库的两个版本进行的PSI-BLAST搜索结果，并突出显示仅在更新数据库中出现的命中结果。结果以易于理解的表格形式呈现，或以类似BLAST的报告形式呈现，使用颜色突出显示新的命中结果。ReHAB旨在处理大量查询序列，例如全基因组或基因组集。使用ReHAB不需要高级计算机技能；图形界面易于使用，设计时考虑到了实验室生物学家的需求。
该软件极大地简化了评估大量蛋白质数据库搜索输出的问题。
