Unipro UGENE

Unipro UGENE is a powerful piece of software that provides you with advanced tools for creating, editing and annotating nucleic acid and protein sequences. The application also helps you view and edit chromatograms.

Right off the bat, before you even get started using this app, we strongly recommend that you take a quick look at the app's online documentation, tutorials and built-in manuals, which do a great job at shortening the learning period.

The main window of Unipro UGENE is not what you would call airy, as it features access to almost all its main features in plain sight, with the help of an all-encompassing toolbar and an unobtrusive menu bar. Despite its somewhat crowded main window, with a bit of practice, you can easily find your way around.

If we were to nitpick, we would say that some slightly larger buttons would have made the toolbar look even nicer and would provide quicker access to its features.

In terms of features, let us just say that the application does not suffer any kind of shortages. It comes with support for multiple biological data formats and it provides visualization modules for objects ranging from next-generation sequencing data all the way up to phylogenetic trees and other complex 3D structures.

You can construct dotplots for nucleic acid sequences, search for a pattern of algorithm results in a nucleic acid sequence and search for direct, inverted and tandem repeats in DNA sequences with its built-in query designer.

You can combine various algorithms into custom working sequences with its workflow designer feature. For data analysis, you can rely on its Tuxedo and Cistrome pipeline, as well as on its built-in chromatogram viewer.

Taking all of the above into careful consideration, Unipro UGENE is a complex computational tool that provides bioinformatics researchers with a new way to process NGS data.

The application is fairly lightweight when compared to other apps of this sort, comes with a hefty documentation and lots of tutorials, and packs extensive tools for viewing, analyzing, creating, editing and sharing your work in bioinformatics.