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Published on: February 5, 2014
ALINE: a WYSIWYG protein-sequence alignment editor for publication-quality alignments
Charles Simon Bond1, Alexander Wolfgang Schüttelkopf
1School of Biomedical, Biomolecular and Chemical Sciences, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. charles.bond@uwa.edu.au
Summary
ALINE is a new graphical editor that simplifies the creation of publication-quality protein sequence alignments. This tool streamlines figure generation for biochemistry, bioinformatics, and structural biology research.
Area of Science:
- Biochemistry
- Bioinformatics
- Structural Biology
Background:
- Sequence alignments are central figures in scientific articles across multiple biological disciplines.
- Current methods for generating alignment figures are often cumbersome, with limitations in interactive tools and repetitive scripting for batch programs.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce ALINE, a novel software tool for creating high-quality sequence alignment figures.
- To provide a user-friendly and efficient solution for generating publication-ready figures for protein sequence data.
Main Methods:
- ALINE is a portable, interactive graphical sequence alignment editor.
- It is implemented using the Perl/Tk programming language.
- The software employs a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) approach.
Main Results:
- ALINE produces publication-quality sequence alignment figures.
- It offers an intuitive graphical interface for editing alignments.
- The tool simplifies the often unwieldy process of figure generation.
Conclusions:
- ALINE provides an efficient and aesthetically pleasing method for generating sequence alignment figures.
- The software is freely available, promoting accessibility for researchers in relevant fields.
- ALINE addresses the limitations of existing tools for creating essential figures in biological publications.
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