TReaDS: Tandem Repeats Discovery Service

Alessio Vecchio¹, M. Elena Renda² and Marco Pellegrini²

Istituto di Informatica e Telematica - C.N.R.

Technical Report Number: 2008-TR-06
Via G. Moruzzi,1
I-56124 Pisa (PI) ITALY

¹ Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
University of Pisa
I-56100
Pisa (PI) ITALY

² Istituto di Informatica e Telematica (IIT)
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)
I-56100
Pisa (PI) ITALY

Abstract. Tandem repeats (TRs) are multiple duplications of substrings in the DNA that occur contiguously, or at a short distance, and may involve some mutations (such as substitutions, insertions, and deletions). The analysis of TRs is an important genetic profiling technique. In fact, TRs can be used, for instance, to detect evolutionary phenomena in populations, to identify the cause of several diseases, and to help in determining parentage. There are several web-based resources or downloadable packages for finding TRs, but such tools rarely give exactly the same result for a given input. Thus, biologists could be interested in a tool that, not only gives them the possibility of querying multiple systems at the same time, but also simplifies the burden of comparing and merging the results. TReaDS (Tandem Repeats Discovery Service) is a tandem repeat meta search engine that finds exact, approximate, short and long TRs. TReaDS queries several web-based tools and merges their outcome into a single report, providing a global, synthetic, and comparative view of the different results.

Availability TReaDS, the Tandem Repeats Discovery Service, is a web application free and open to all users without login requirement at the following URL: http://bioalgo.iit.cnr.it/treads.

For full paper: please contact me (Elena.Renda_AT_iit.cnr.it).