EMBOSS is a new, free Open Source software analysis package specially developed for the needs of the molecular biology (e.g. EMBnet) user community. The software automatically copes with data in a variety of formats and even allows transparent retrieval of sequence data from the web. Also, as extensive libraries are provided with the package, it is a platform to allow other scientists to develop and release software in true open source spirit. EMBOSS also integrates a range of currently available packages and tools for sequence analysis into a seamless whole. EMBOSS breaks the historical trend towards commercial software packages.

The EMBOSS suite:

•    Provides a comprehensive set of sequence analysis programs (approximately 100)

•    Provides a set of core software libraries (AJAX and NUCLEUS)

•    Integrates other publicly available packages

•    Encourages the use of EMBOSS in sequence analysis training.

•    Encourages developers elsewhere to use the EMBOSS libraries.

•    Supports all common Unix platforms including Linux, Digital Unix, Irix and Solaris.

•    Within EMBOSS you will find over 100 programs (applications).

These are just some of the areas covered:

•    Sequence alignment

•    Rapid database searching with sequence patterns

•    Protein motif identification, including domain analysis

•    EST analysis

•    Nucleotide sequence pattern analysis, for example to identify CpG islands.

•    Simple and species-specific repeat identification

•    Codon usage analysis for small genomes

•    Rapid identification of sequence patterns in large scale sequence sets.

•    Presentation tools for publication

•    And much more.

More information about EMBOSS can be found here: http://emboss.sourceforge.net/

wEMBOSS is a Web interface to the EMBOSS package for sequence analysis. It’s developed by Martin Sarachu (Argentina) and Marc Colet (Belgium)

Features:

•    Each user has a separate and private workspace.

•    Organize your work by creating projects and subprojects.

•    Results saved for easy recover & review.

•    Inline help.

•    Keyword search for programs and documentation.

•    Administrator can exclude EMBOSS programs from wEMBOSS or add external programs via wrappers

More information about wEMBOSS can be found here: http://www.ch.embnet.org/EMBOSS/index.html