Recent Hits Acquired by BLAST (ReHAB): A tool to identify new hits in sequence similarity searches
Date
2005-02-08
Authors
Whitney, Joe
Esteban, David J
Upton, Chris
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
BMC Bioinformatics
Abstract
Background:
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.
Results:
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.
Conclusions:
This software greatly simplifies the problem of evaluating the output of large
numbers of protein database searches
Description
BioMedCentral
Keywords
Citation
Whitney, J et al. BMC Bioinformatics 2005, 6 :23