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Home >> Biotechnology and Genomics >> Bioinformatics and Data Mining - In Silico Biology >>EST Clustering Packages

EST clustering packages

Due to the current emphasis on functional genomics, ESTs are fast accumulating in Est databases. ESTs for more than 250 species are already available in dbEST. Even with the advent of genomics research, most of these species will not have their entire genomies sequenced in the foreseeable future. Therefore, Est clustering and assembly is a desirable approach, also making it a thrust area of research. These assemblies will prove important in the identification of biologically interesting gene sequences. The sequences identified thus can be used for a variety of purpose, including the following: (i) identification of SNPs, alternative splice variants and the coding regions in genomic DNA, and (ii) designing of gene expression chips. Following are a few packages used for EST clustering and assembly

CORPUs (contig refinement performed using semantics).

The main goal of EST clustering is to reconstruct the full length cDNA associated with a gene. Sometimes ESTs do overlap, thus permitting assembly of contigs also (consult previous chapter for contigs). But after having built these contigs, isolated ESTs remain with no significant matching and are described as ‘singletons’. These ESTs (or contigs) can be used for sequence or similarity search, which can be achieved successfully by “CORPUS”

Paracel EST clustering package

Paracel Inc., Pasadena, USA (www.paracel.com) developed Paracel clustering package, which is a program, that combines the tasks of filtering, clustering and assembly of ESTs into a single pipeline. Other Est clustering packages are also used by many workers. For instance, STACK_PACK was initially (in 1999) used for clustering human ESTs and more recently (in 2002) it was also used for clustering barley ESTs

 

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