BioEdit

BioEdit is designed for the scientists and laboratory technicians that work with biological sequences. It is basically a text editor enhanced with features specific to sequence alignment and manipulation tasks.It can be used in conjunction with BioLign, a tool instrument specially designed to help you with sequence alignments.

Most of its features are designed to improve your efficiency and automate certain tasks such as the ClustalW alignment or the Blast searches. The program also provides you with access to the NCBI sequence bank in order to download or submit the biological sequences.

The GenBank integration enables you to annotate the sequence by using the selected features field. It enables you to draw and annotate plasmids manually by marking positions or adding features to the model.

The interface of the program is rather complex for a beginner but BioEdit comes with a detailed documentation that allows you to get accustomed with the basic features.

The main goal of the app is to reduce the time required to edit and align sequences and it provides you with multiple methods of manual alignment. You can use the mouse for selecting the sequence, sliding it, dropping it to the desired position or removing it from the table.

If you are used to command line tools you can apply the on-screen typing method in the text editor. The interface can help you with alignment tasks by using different colors and by enabling you to control the background colors.

You can import sequence data from multiple file formats such as MSF, ASN.1 and EMBL. The results of the alignment can be exported to more than eleven formats in order to be used for other projects or applications.

BioEdit is a useful tool for manipulating and analyzing biological sequence data. Although it is no longer maintained by the developer, it can still be used for your projects.