A Bioinfomatics Grid Alignment Toolkit

Even though many useful tools for sequence alignment are available, such as BLAST and PSI-BLAST by NCBI and FASTA by the University of Virginia, a key issue regarding sequence databases is their size, growing at an exponential rate. Grid and parallel computing are crucial techniques to maintain and improve the effectiveness of sequence comparison tools, whilst the Web Services approach may guarantee the interoperability among large collections of programs and data. This paper describes BioGAT, Bioinformatics Grid Alignment Toolkit, that offers optimized brokering and a data management system to exploit various bioinformatics alignment tools wrapped as Web Services in a Grid architecture.