[BiO BB] DNA Strider

[Yannick Wurm]

Hi,
I'm a student in Bioinformatics and Modeling at a French engineering 
school in Lyon, France (http://biosciences.insa-lyon.fr). Currently in 
my last year, I'm currently doing a six month internship in a C. 
elegans lab at McGill University in Montreal.
The lab's computer are Macs, and besides standard browsing, word 
processing and image processing, lab members also use them to aid them 
in their molecular biology work.
One of the programs they use is called DNA Strider. This piece of 
software has not been updated in a long time (probably since Apple's 
System 6.x - window sizes are fixed to the small old mac screen size!) 
and could require a face-lift.

In the lab, it is mainly used for managing and manipulating sequences 
of genes, primers and constructs. The main features of interest here 
are:
	- Sequence management
     - Graphical (circular or linear) restriction maps of a given 
sequence (or part of it), showing restriction site data concerning the 
part or whole sequence (for each enzyme, you get the number of 
restriction sites, and the obtained fragement sizes)
	- Reverse complementary sequence
	- Quick and simple alignment between two sequences

I've searched the web and could not find an all-in-one package that 
seemed as user friendly and coherent as DNA Strider. Individual web 
sites and software tools do offer these features, but
	- the internet is slow (you click and need to wait before getting your 
result)
	- having everything in one place is nice

Sequence Analysis (for Mac OS X) http://informagen.com/SA/ seems to be 
aiming to do what DNA Strider does, but is still very young (and 
closed-source, but thats a different debate).

http://www.mekentosj.com/ has some very nice tools as well, but they're 
very problem-specific.

Have I missed something? Is there a really cool java app or web 
software (that I could install locally for speed) that would replace 
DNA Strider? What does your molecular biology lab use in for it's day 
to day work?
Oh and buying something expensive is not a solution.

Thanks for any leads,

Yannick.

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