PepTool and GeneTool:: Platform-Independent Tools for Biological Sequence Analysis

PepTool™ and GeneTool™ are two new bioinformatics software packages currently being offered by BioTools Inc. (www. bio too ls . com). As the names might imply, PepTool is designed for protein sequence analysis and GeneTool is designed for DNA sequence analysis. The combined package is typically priced at $1500 for academic users and $1875 for commercial users. PepTool is actually based on two public domain programs originally developed at the University of Alberta-SEQSEE (1 ) and XALIGN (2 ). These two UNIX-specific programs were later adapted to other platforms, given a graphical user interface (3 ) and subsequently licensed to BioTools as a commercial package called PepTool. GeneTool was developed independently by BioTools, although it uses some key concepts and algorithms originally found in PepTool. PepTool (version 1.0) was released in December 1997 and GeneTool (version 1.0) was released in December 1998.