Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA.
BMC Bioinformatics. 2012 Jun 7;13:124. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-13-124.
The ability to manipulate, edit and process DNA and protein sequences has rapidly become a necessary skill for practicing biologists across a wide swath of disciplines. In spite of this, most everyday sequence manipulation tools are distributed across several programs and web servers, sometimes requiring installation and typically involving frequent switching between applications. To address this problem, here we have developed BioWord, a macro-enabled self-installing template for Microsoft Word documents that integrates an extensive suite of DNA and protein sequence manipulation tools.
BioWord is distributed as a single macro-enabled template that self-installs with a single click. After installation, BioWord will open as a tab in the Office ribbon. Biologists can then easily manipulate DNA and protein sequences using a familiar interface and minimize the need to switch between applications. Beyond simple sequence manipulation, BioWord integrates functionality ranging from dyad search and consensus logos to motif discovery and pair-wise alignment. Written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as an open source, object-oriented project, BioWord allows users with varying programming experience to expand and customize the program to better meet their own needs.
BioWord integrates a powerful set of tools for biological sequence manipulation within a handy, user-friendly tab in a widely used word processing software package. The use of a simple scripting language and an object-oriented scheme facilitates customization by users and provides a very accessible educational platform for introducing students to basic bioinformatics algorithms.
操纵、编辑和处理 DNA 和蛋白质序列的能力已经迅速成为广大生物学领域从业者的必备技能。尽管如此，大多数日常序列操作工具分布在多个程序和网络服务器中，有时需要安装，并且通常需要在应用程序之间频繁切换。为了解决这个问题，我们开发了 BioWord，这是一个针对 Microsoft Word 文档的、带有宏功能的自安装模板，其中集成了一套广泛的 DNA 和蛋白质序列操作工具。
BioWord 以单个带有宏功能的模板形式分发，只需点击一次即可进行自安装。安装完成后，BioWord 将作为 Office 功能区中的一个选项卡打开。然后，生物学家可以使用熟悉的界面轻松地操作 DNA 和蛋白质序列，并最大限度地减少在应用程序之间切换的需要。除了简单的序列操作，BioWord 还集成了从二联体搜索和共有基序 logo 到基序发现和两两比对的功能。BioWord 是用 Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) 编写的，是一个开源的、面向对象的项目，允许具有不同编程经验的用户扩展和自定义程序，以更好地满足自己的需求。
BioWord 在一个广泛使用的文字处理软件包中，将一组强大的生物学序列操作工具集成到一个方便、用户友好的选项卡中。使用简单的脚本语言和面向对象的方案，便于用户自定义，并为向学生介绍基本生物信息学算法提供了一个非常容易接近的教育平台。
