June 15, 2005 (Vol. 25, No. 12)
URL:
http://www.broad.mit.edu/annotation/argo/index.html
Rating:
Strong Points: Communications options
Weak Points: Too little information
Summary:
The Broad Institute at MIT has a mission to “create tools for genomic medicine and make them broadly available to the scientific community.” The site associated with the institute is rather impressive, but that is not the focus of this report. The software tool they freely distribute called Argo is worth noting all on its own. Written as a Java application (translation—multiplatform), Argo is a tool for visualizing and manually annotating entire genomes. The program can display sequence and annotation tracks from numerous information formats (FASTA, Genbank, GFF, BLAST, and Genscan files). It provides an interactive zoom from megabases down to the nucleotide level. Updates to Argo are made monthly (according to the site). Worth a check, particularly in view of its price—free!
