Bioinformatics Applications Note Haplowser: a Whole-genome Haplotype Browser for Personal Genome and Metagenome

SUMMARY Haplotype assembly is becoming a very important tool in genome sequencing of human and other organisms. Although haplotypes were previously inferred from genome assemblies, there has never been a comparative haplotype browser that depicts a global picture of whole-genome alignments among haplotypes of different organisms. We introduce a whole-genome HAPLotype brOWSER (HAPLOWSER), providing evolutionary perspectives from multiple aligned haplotypes and functional annotations. Haplowser enables the comparison of haplotypes from metagenomes, and associates conserved regions or the bases at the conserved regions with functional annotations and custom tracks. The associations are quantified for further analysis and presented as pie charts. Functional annotations and custom tracks that are projected onto haplotypes are saved as multiple files in FASTA format. Haplowser provides a user-friendly interface, and can display alignments of haplotypes with functional annotations at any resolution. AVAILABILITY Haplowser, written in Java, supports multiple platforms including Windows and Linux. Haplowser is publicly available at http://embio.yonsei.ac.kr/haplowser .

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