In the laboratory you find a changing collection of bioinformatics software that is currently under construction. You are welcome to inspect or experiment with these programs. The purpose of making these programs available here is, of course, the desire to get advice from colleagues, and early feedback from potential users. So, if you visit the laboratory, be sure to share your observations with the software developers.

Currently, the following prototypes are on display:

• caRNAsta - Comparative Analysis of RNA Structures by Tree Alignment

  caRNAsta allows you to compare one to many RNA secondary structures by using tree alignments.

• GeneView II

  GeneView is a Java tool that allows the visualization of genetic sequence data. The data to be visualized is taken from the GenBank of NIH (National Institute of Health), an annotated collection of publicly accessible DNA and RNA sequences.

• ViSeL

  ViSeL is a PC-based virtual sequencing laboratory, designed to support laboratory courses. It cannot (yet) been used via the Internet, but you may have a taste if you operate from a PC under Windows.

• UnivAln.pm

  UnivAln.pm is a prototype Perl module for handling multiple alignment data. It was developed around 1997, when Bioperl was coordinated in Bielefeld. For some time, it was part of the Bioperl distribution, but since it was not developed further, Bioperl adopted a different way of handling alignments, but UnivAln.pm is still available since it offers some functionality that is not included in Bioperl yet.
  (The Bioperl project is an international effort to develop free software, in particular for handling biosequence and alignment data. It uses Perl, an excellent "Glue Language" for interfacing C/Fortran code, WWW/CGI, graphics, numerical analysis and much more.)

• viwish (Group for Applied Computer Science)

  viwish is a visualisation tool for proteins from the PDB. It is completely menu driven and can display arbitrary many proteins in arbitrary many windows menus, configurations, and windows. In addition, a wide range of chemical data can be displayed. Therefore the system is especially useful for the development of algorithms that need visual inspection and verification of externally computed results like docked conformations or molecular surface shapes.