Genlight: Interactive high-throughput sequence analysis and comparative genomics

Abstract

With rising numbers of fully sequenced genomes the importance of comparative genomics is constantly increasing. Although several software systems for genome comparison analyses do exist, their functionality and flexibility is still limited, compared to the manifold possible applications. Therefore, we developed Genlight(http://piranha.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de.), a Client/Server based program suite for large scale sequence analysis and comparative genomics. Genlight uses the object relational database system PostgreSQL together with a state of the art data representation and a distributed execution approach for large scale analysis tasks. The system includes a wide variety of comparison and sequence manipulation methods and supports the management of nucleotide sequences as well as protein sequences. The comparison methods are complemented by a large variety of visualization methods for the assessment of the generated results. In order to demonstrate the suitability of the system for the treatment of biological questions, Genlight was used to identify potential drug and vaccine targets of the pathogen Helicobacter pylori.