PANORAMA: An integrated web-based sequence analysis tool and its role in gene discovery

As the exponential growth of DNA sequence information in databases continue s, the task of converting this deposited information into knowledge becomes more dependent on integrative sequence analysis and visualization tools, P ANORAMA is an Internet-accessible software package that performs a variety of informatics analyses on a given DNA sequence and returns a visual and in teractive representation of the results. Its design is modular, so that fur ther sequence analysis tools can be integrated with minimal effort. The uti lity of PANORAMA is demonstrated in the analysis of 650 kb of human genomic DNA from chromosome region 3p21.3, a region of potential tumor suppressor genes involved in lung cancer, breast cancer, and other forms of cancer. PA NORAMA aided in the discovery of genes and alternate splice forms of known exons, in the demarcation of intron-exon boundaries, and in the identificat ion of promoter regions and polymorphisms, all of which contributed to a be tter understanding of the region. PANORAMA is available on the World Wide W eb at http://atlas.swmed.edu. (C) 2000 Academic Press.