Durand P, Canard L, Mornon J P
Laboratoire de Minéralogie-Cristallographie, CNRS URA09, Universités Paris VI-Paris VII, France.
Comput Appl Biosci. 1997 Aug;13(4):407-13. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/13.4.407.
When routinely analysing protein sequences, detailed analysis of database search results made with BLAST and FASTA becomes exceedingly time consuming and tedious work, as the resultant file may contain a list of hundreds of potential homologies. The interpretation of these results is usually carried out with a text editor which is not a convenient tool for this analysis. In addition, the format of data within BLAST and FASTA output files makes them difficult to read.
To facilitate and accelerate this analysis, we present for the first time, two easy-to-use programs designed for interactive analysis of full BLAST and FASTA output files containing protein sequence alignments. The programs, Visual BLAST and Visual FASTA, run under Microsoft Windows 95 or NT systems. They are based on the same intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) with extensive viewing, searching, editing, printing and multithreading capabilities. These programs improve the browsing of BLAST/FASTA results by offering a more convenient presentation of these results. They also implement on a computer several analytical tools which automate a manual methodology used for detailed analysis of BLAST and FASTA outputs. These tools include a pairwise sequence alignment viewer, a Hydrophobic Cluster Analysis plot alignment viewer and a tool displaying a graphical map of all database sequences aligned with the query sequence. In addition. Visual Blast includes tools for multiple sequence alignment analysis (with an amino acid patterns search engine), and Visual FASTA provides a GUI to the FASTA program.
在对蛋白质序列进行常规分析时，使用BLAST和FASTA进行数据库搜索结果的详细分析会变得极其耗时且乏味，因为生成的文件可能包含数百个潜在同源性的列表。这些结果的解读通常使用文本编辑器来进行，而文本编辑器并非进行此分析的便捷工具。此外，BLAST和FASTA输出文件中的数据格式使其难以阅读。
为了便于和加速此分析，我们首次展示了两个易于使用的程序，它们专为交互式分析包含蛋白质序列比对的完整BLAST和FASTA输出文件而设计。这两个程序，即可视化BLAST和可视化FASTA，在Microsoft Windows 95或NT系统下运行。它们基于相同直观的图形用户界面（GUI），具有广泛的查看、搜索、编辑、打印和多线程功能。这些程序通过更方便地呈现这些结果来改进对BLAST/FASTA结果的浏览。它们还在计算机上实现了几种分析工具，这些工具将用于详细分析BLAST和FASTA输出的手动方法自动化。这些工具包括一个双序列比对查看器、一个疏水簇分析图比对查看器以及一个显示与查询序列比对的所有数据库序列的图形化图谱的工具。此外，可视化BLAST包括用于多序列比对分析的工具（带有氨基酸模式搜索引擎），而可视化FASTA为FASTA程序提供了一个GUI。
