Sequence profiling Tools in bioinformatics refer to all those software tools (web-based/downloadable) that provide a brief overview on all related information about an input sequence.

The advent of post-genomics era has given rise to a range of web based tools and software to handle the deluge of biological information. A simple web-search returns any number of such services and software tools ranging from the popular public domains e.g. NCBI, ExPASy , Ensembl , PDB etc to private research group sites e.g. eF-site, Dipole moment server, SuperPose, REBASE. However, most of these remain obscure/under-explored to a bench-top molecular biologist who most often would like to quickly know which record in the BLAST report is useful for further analysis (given that the first few hits are already known) OR like to have a guess at what would a newly found ORF look like after translation.

In other words the user often needs an interface that acts like a Propaedia or a gateway, giving him a brief overview about his sequence (DNA/RNA/protein) while still allowing advanced operations without having to leave the browser session. Sites like Entrez provide this kind of facility for text related searches in biomedical field.

External links

• Entrez - A keyword indexing tool for biomedical terms across NCBI daatabases
• Sequerome - A Sequence Profiling Tool across databases
• Bioinformatic Harvester - A Sequence Profiling Tool across databases
• Google - Needs no introduction... Try pasting any sequence into google you might lucky