We would like to announce the launch of a new free service which gives public access to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Trace Archive via sequence similarity. The archive contains records of all publicly available DNA sequencing reads. The search engine allows users to identify any sequences in the archive with significant similarity to their query sequence. Users are able to search the whole archive in a few seconds, or alternatively to limit the search by species, sequencing centre or trace type. We use a distributed version of the SSAHA algorithm to distribute an index over a cluster of machines so that we can continue to scale the service as the archive grows.

We welcome any feedback and suggestions for improvements to thes service.

URL

http://trace.ensembl.org/cgi-bin/tracesearch