List of alignment visualization software

This page is a subsection of List of sequence alignment software.

Multiple alignment visualization tools typically serve four purposes:

• General comprehension of large-scale DNA or protein alignments
• Visualization of alignments for figures and publication.
• Manual editing and curation of automatically generated alignments.
• In depth analysis

The rest of this article is focused on just multiple global alignments of homologous proteins. The first two are a natural consequence of the fact that most computational representations of alignments and their annotation are not human readable and best portrayed in the familiar sequence row and alignment column format, of which examples are widespread in the literature. The third is a necessity because both Multiple sequence alignment and Structural alignment algorithms utilise heuristics which do not always perform perfectly. The fourth is a great example of how interactive graphical tools enable a worker involved in sequence analysis to conveniently execute a variety if different computational tools in order to explore an alignment's phylogenetic implications; or, to predict the structure and functional properties of a specific sequence (e.g. comparative modelling).

Alignment viewers/editors

Some useful discussions on sequence alignment editors/viewers can be found here:

• http://lists.open-bio.org/pipermail/emboss/2008-July/003324.html

See also

• Sequence alignment software
• Biological data visualization