Purpose of GWFASTA:

FASTA was the first widely used program for database similarity searching and achieved a high degree of sensitivity by performing optimized searches for local alignments using a substitution matrix. Detailed performance studies of these methods have shown that FASTA performs better than BLAST (Pearson 1995). Inspite of these findings FASTA programs has not been utilized for similarity searches on a wider scale compared to BLAST mainly due to the delay in getting results and consequent lack of interest in the experimentalist. However, with the improvement in the algorithms, FASTA is now beginning to find its feet as a advantageous tool for similarity searches.

GWFASTA in an unique server whose main objectives are:

1. to give genomic perspective to the FASTA output,

2. to assist users in post-processing of FASTA reports in areas like compositonal analysis, sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis,

3. to automate submission for multiple sequences.

The server allows the user to perform FASTA search on their DNA or protein query against 11 archaeal, 54 bacterial and 8 eukaryotic genomes and their proteomes (all protein products of complete genome of an organism).