About the image
The figure is taken from output of the MotifAnal program Dr. Jacobs wrote during his Ph.D. research (Cambridge, 1988-92). The sequence alignment shown is that of the nine CCHH zinc-finger repeats of the Xenoupus TFIIIA protein. The sequence has been coloured for this illustration.

MotifAnal was designed for the analysis of large alignments of motifs, for example Jacobs, G.H. EMBO J. 11(12)4507-4517 (1992) reports the analysis of 1200 CCHH zinc-finger motifs using this software. MotifAnal has a query system designed to allow exploration of protein sequence features, subclasses of amino acids, correlations between residue positions and functional site prediction among other features.

BioinfoTools is developing software to store and rapidly process large amounts of sequence data. The higher-level products described elsewhere on this web site will be built on top of this "sequence processing engine".

This work involves integrating ideas and software written by Dr. Jacobs over the past 10 years. Both single and multiple- sequence strategies will be catered for. All types of sequence data (DNA, RNA or protein sequences) can be processed. More details will issued nearer to the time of the public release of the software.