Expressed Sequence Tags: Analysis and Annotation

Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) present a special set of problems for bioinformatic analysis. They are partial and error-prone, and large datasets can have significant internal redundancy. To facilitate analysis of small EST datasets from in-house projects, we present an integrated “pipeline” of tools that take EST data from sequence trace to database submission. These tools also can be used to provide clustering of ESTs into putative genes and to annotate these genes with preliminary sequence similarity searches. The systems are written to use the public-domain LINUX environment and other openly available analytical tools.