Category:SEALS

SEALS (A System for Easy Analysis of Lots of Sequences) is a software package expressly designed for large-scale research projects in bioinformatics. Using a friendly, scalable command-line user interface, SEALS provides dozens of commands to help the user quickly implement standard sequence analysis protocols, design new investigations, and generally Get Things Done with dispatch.

Notes

I applaud the efforts of Roland Walker et al. for releasing the SEALS package to the general scientific community, free of charge. I am especially pleased that they placed an emphasis on the CLI and I/O streams.

My two criticisms would be

1. The installation process is far more complicated than it needs to be (e.g., it thinks Perl version 5.8.8 is older than version 5.004_04, error messages are either non-existant or cryptic, etc.); and
2. I am strongly opposed to CLI scripts dictating which shell to use (i.e., you must use tcsh instead of bash)

External links

• SEALS website