DASher: a stand-alone protein sequence client for DAS, the Distributed Annotation System

Abstract

The rise in biological sequence data has led to a proliferation of separate, specialized databases. While there is great value in having many independent annotations, it is critical that there be a way to integrate them in one combined view. The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) was developed for that very purpose. There are currently no DAS clients that are open source, specialized for aggregating and comparing protein sequence annotation, and that can run as a self-contained application outside of a web browser. The speed, flexibility and extensibility that come with a stand-alone application motivated us to create DASher, an open-source Java DAS client. Given a UniProt sequence identifier, DASher automatically queries DAS-supporting servers worldwide for any information on that sequence and then displays the annotations in an interactive viewer for easy comparison. DASher is a fast, Java-based DAS client optimized for viewing protein sequence annotation and compliant with the latest DAS protocol specification 1.53E. DASher is available for direct use and download at http://dasher.sbc.su.se including examples and source code under the GPLv3 licence. Java version 6 or higher is required.