ABSTRACT
As you work your way through this book, and your own analyses, you will encounter times when you need a small utility that does one thing and does it well. This chapter will focus on sequence analysis utilities that come in handy for work in the average academic, biotechnology, or pharmaceutical laboratory. You’ve already discovered how a word-processing program can save you time and minimize errors through the “Find and Replace” function. These additional programs described in this chapter are more sophisticated and specific for sequence analysis. They will help you design and implement experiments as well as analyze and make sense of the data collected. They will often make the difference between knowing answers and just guessing. If you are ever doing anything manual, repetitive, and prone to error, you should ask yourself “is there a simple tool which can do this for me?”
