[comp.archives] [bionet] PC Sequence - Summary

DANJ@jhuhyg.bitnet (Dan Jacobson) (04/02/91)

Archive-name: bionet/sequences/macaw/1991-04-01
Archive-directory: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:/pub/macaw/ [130.14.20.1]
Original-posting-by: DANJ@jhuhyg.bitnet (Dan Jacobson)
Original-subject: PC Sequence - Summary
Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)


Hi,

There was a fare amount of traffic on my request for a program which draws boxe
s around identical sites in sequence alignments and a request for a summary so
here's one of the responses that didn't appaear on Bio-Soft.

First of all thanks to all those that responded - the net is quite a friendly
environ.

There were several suggestions as seen on the bboard about dropping the alignme
nt into a clipboard in windows or uploading the alignment onto a MAC and beauti
fying it.

The best  program that I have found is called macaw.  Macaw is a fancy m
ultiple sequence alignment program which requires Microsoft Windows 3.0 (or hig
her).  Macaw is available via FTP from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (130.14020.1) under
pub/macaw.  Macaw comes in a variety of compressed formats, arc, zip and lzh,
- remember to import and download it using the binary mode.

Macaw will only run under windows and thus your PC must have at least 1Meg of
MEMORY.  Macaw doesn't draw boxes but instead color codes the residues and the
background in accordance with their  relative similarity.  On a normal printer
these will come out in different shades of gray.  Macaw also draws schematics
of the seqences beeing compared - again can be color coded.
From what I've seen so far macaw is a very nice program,  many thanks go to Gre
g Schuler (author) for help in getting started and Don Lehn for telling me abou
t macaw in the first place.


Again thanks to all who responded.

Dan Jacobson
danj@jhuhyg.sph.jhu.edu (internet)
danj@jhuhyg (bitnet)