fastachar 0.2.4

A simple program with GUI to compare dna sequences

Fastachar is a graphical user interface that allows a simple comparison of two sets of DNA sequences. A typical working example is to have a selection of DNA sequences of different, but related species. These sequences are divided in a set A, which are thought to be a single taxon (species) and a set B, which is a collection of different taxa. Using the program, it can be established easily whether:

• the DNA sequences in set A are all identical, and if not, list the differences for those positions in the DNA sequences.

• set B has positions in the DNA that are different from those in set A, across all species in set B.

Fastachar takes as input the alignments stored in a single file of the fasta format. Fastachar is not a tool to align sequences. It is assumed that the sequences were previously aligned with different algorithms (e.g. MUSCLE) and the most reliable alignment was chosen.