The Software Needed for Making and Refining a Flexible Information Model

by Nitasha Klar

Making A Sequence Logo

a sequence logo of human donor splice junction sites

(Program names are in bold.)

  • catal : cataloguer of delila libraries.
  • delila : the librarian for sequence manipulation. It reads instructions written in delila language from the inst file and puts the resulting output sequences in a book.
  • alist : reads the inst file to align the book generated by delila and creates a list, one in color called the clist.
  • encode : encodes a book of sequences into strings of integers and puts it in the encseq file.
  • comp : determines the composition of a book.
  • rseq : takes the encoded sequences from the encseq file and convers it to a table of frequencies for each base at each aligned position. Rseq is calculated and a weight matrix is generated which can be used to search for sites. The output is stored in the rsdata file.
  • dalvec : converts the rsdata file outputted by rseq into the symvec format that the makelogo program can use.
  • ri : rindividual is calculated for every site in the aligned book according to the frequencies given in the rsdata file. ri outputs a ribl which is the information content for each base at position "l". The ribl is used by scan to scan over a different inst file of selected sites.
  • makelogo : generates a sequence logo for a set of aligned sequences by reading the rsdata file (output of dalvec) which is in the symvec format.
  • *run.logo : runs all the logo making programs in one step, from delila through makelogo.

    Making A Walker

    A sequence walker for a human donor splice junction cag(g)taatcc. The second g is surrounded by a box because it is the zero coordinate of the sequence. The letters have different heights representing the information each contributes in bits to the total of the site. The last three letters are upside down and backwards because they are detrimental to binding.

    In addition to the above programs, the following programs are required for creating walkers.

  • scan : scans a book with a ribl weight matrix, outputted by the ri program, and generates a vector.
  • lister : lists the sequences of pieces in a book with translation.
  • genhis : takes numerical data from a file and plots a histogram of those data. It also calculates the min, max, mean and variance of the data.
  • discan : compares the binding patterns of 2 different binding site models, it selects sites that are within a certain range of each other and then adds their individual information together and subtracts a distance based distribution probability value to determine the new total information.
  • diclean : same as discan, except does not generate lister features.

    • Looking For a Stronger Alignment


  • markov : generates a set of random dna sequences which have approximately the same composition as the one in the composition file supplied to the program.
  • embed : embed an aligned set of DNA sequences into random sequences.
  • malign : given a book of aligned sequences, this program searches for the alignment of the sequences that has the lowest uncertainty, i.e. the highest value of Rsequence.
  • malin : makes delila instructions from the nth alignment of malign.
  • *sam : a shell program that combines all the steps needed to malign in one, from markov to malign.

    The Refining Process:

    Eliminating sites that have a negative information content.

  • mk.inst2 : a shell program that eliminates the negatives from the dsout/dcout file (outputted from the discan/diclean programs, and makes delila instruction files of the positive sites, using the makeinst program.

  • makeinst : creates a delila instruction file using an input data file containing the specified coordinates.

    This page, created by Nitasha Klar, was last modified on March 24, 2000.

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    Schneider Lab
    origin:    2000 Mar 24
    updated: 2013 May 14

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