BlasterJS: A novel interactive JavaScript visualisation component for BLAST alignment results

• Published in: PloS one 2018-10, Vol.13 (10), p.e0205286-e0205286
• Main Authors: Blanco-Míguez, Aitor, Fdez-Riverola, Florentino, Sánchez, Borja, Lourenço, Anália
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alignment; Amino Acid Sequence; Animals; Applications programs; Base Sequence; Bioinformatics; Biology and Life Sciences; Computational Biology - methods; Computational Biology - statistics & numerical data; Computer and Information Sciences; Computer Graphics; Computer science; Deoxyribonucleic acid; DNA; Engineering and Technology; Expected values; Humans; Internet; Java; Medical research; Microbiota - genetics; Molecular biology; Proteins; Research and analysis methods; Science & Technology; Sequence Alignment; Similarity; User interface; Visualization; Web Browser
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205286

Background The wide range of potential applications has made the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) a ubiquitous tool in the field of Molecular Biology. Within this context, it is increasingly appealing to embed BLAST services within larger Web applications. Results This work introduces BlasterJS viewer, a new JavaScript library for the lightweight development of Web-based applications supporting the visualisation of BLAST outputs. BlasterJS detaches from similar data viewers by focusing on the visual and interactive display of sequence similarity results and being completely independent of BLAST services. BlasterJS is compatible with the text outputs generated by the BLAST family of programs, namely BLASTp, BLASTn, BLASTx, tBLASTn, and tBLASTx, and works in all major Web browsers. Furthermore, BlasterJS is available through the EBIs BioJS registry 5, which extends its potential use to a wider scope of bioinformatics applications. Conclusions BlasterJS is new Javascript library that enables easy and seamless integration of visual and interactive representations of BLAST outputs in Web-based applications supporting sequence similarity search. BlasterJS is free accessible at http://sing-group.org/blasterjs/. This work was supported by the Spanish “Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Inovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad” (grant AGL2013-44039R to BS and AL); and the Asociación Española Contra el Cancer ("Obtencio ´n de pe ´pti-dosbioactivos contra el Cáncer ColoRectal a partir de secuencias gene ´ticas de microbiomas intestinales", grant PS-2016 to BS and ABM). This study was also supportedby the PortugueseFoundationfor Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit(AL) and COMPETE2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684 to AL). SING group thanks CITI (Centro de Investigación, Transferencia e Innovación) from University of Vigo for hosting its IT infrastructure. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.