instaseq

Ever wondered if you entered a nucleotide OR a peptide sequence into a search engine and whether you would get any results? You are probably already aware that the chances of getting helpful information on what that sequence belongs to are close to nil.

One approach is to use a sequence alignment program, an approach already familiar to Biomedical Researchers. This is an excellent and perfect approach except that it is limited to a particular database that stores the sequences (however exhaustive it may be). Further, there are many pages on the web that retrieve information containing these sequences. For example, patent records available publicly in the internet domain contain sequence records, that can a new layer of information to the search. So also public documents like pdf files etc from theses of researchers.

Instaseq is a quick search on the web to locate any other documents containing the input sequences. The current version is an implementation of the original paper conceived and developed by Dr. Natarajan Ganesan - https://www.nature.com/articles/npre.2008.2492.1

The new version intends to expand upon the input sequence and search for translated nucleotide sequences and three-letter amino acid representations of peptide sequences.

The success of retrieval of searches from the input code is vastly enhanced using the Instaseq app. Direct input of a nucleotide or peptide sequence into a search engine is most likely to return no results. Instaseq processes the query into short strings in a particular fashion and submits them to the Google search engine. The app then returns links from publicly available pages on the internet.

Go ahead and copy-paste some short stretches of a DNA, RNA, or Protein sequence from a FASTA file of known origin and check if you can retrieve any information from the web.