Mac software for Biologists
January 14, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania
If you’re a biologist and a Mac user, here’s a list of software that you may find very helpful!
4Peaks is a freely downloadable software that helps molecular biologists visualize and edit their DNA sequence files. 4Peaks supports most commonly used sequence file formats right out of the box. Most of the similar programs available do not run natively on the Mac which makes them run a bit slow.
Other than being quite useful 4Peaks is very beautiful software. To make things easier it also comes with an open source Software Development Kit (SDK) which means you can extend it further. This SDK allows you to program plugins and extend the usefulness of this software.
EnzymeX is a freely downloadable program by same team that brought you 4Peaks. It was initially designed to help you determine which restriction enzymes you should use to cut your DNA of interest. It now is a complete DNA sequence analysis and editing program, which contains powerful and unique features and is above all user friendly.
As with 4Peaks, EnzymeX too has an open source Software Development Kit (SDK) to help you extend its functionality.
Geneious is cross-platform commercial software that is free for academic use. It combines all the major DNA and protein sequence analysis tools into one application. The fact that it runs on all major operating systems means that you can export files and send it to people without worrying about portability.
BioCocoa is an open source Cocoa framework for bioinformatics. It allows Cocoa developers to write tools for various kinds of biology-related tools. This may not interest end users much, but it is very crucial in the creation of more tools for this segment of users.
Origin of Species in a Computer Simulation
The ‘Origin of Species in a Computer Simulation’ is a computer simulation of the evolution of species. It has been released by its German developer, Ivo Näpflin, as an open source program. Unfortunately all of the documentation for this software is only available in German.
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