BLAST-XYPlot viewer: A tool for performing BLAST in whole-genome sequenced bacteria/archaea and visualize whole results simultaneously

Abstract

One of the most commonly used tools to compare protein or DNA sequences against databases is BLAST. We introduce a web tool that allows the performance of BLAST-searches of protein/ DNA sequences in whole-genome sequenced bacteria/archaea, and displays a large amount of BLASTresults simultaneously. The circular bacterial replicons are projected as horizontal lines with fixed length of 360, representing the degrees of a circle. A coordinate system is created with length of the replicon along the x-axis and the number of replicon used on the y-axis. When a query sequence matches with a gene/ protein of a particular replicon, the BLAST-results are depicted as an "x,y" position in a specially adapted plot. This tool allows the visualization of the results from the whole data to a particular gene/protein in real time with low computational resources.