SeqQuests - A New Bioinformatics Toolkit

Top Features

SeqQuests is a new collection of bioinformatics software.

  • Optimised for Apple silicon: A fast Smith-Waterman amino acid sequence comparison.
  • Dual architecture: Scriptable command-line utilities (python) with optional web-browser/API-endpoint interfaces
  • ~18 twilight zone findings: These suggest database annotation updates.

About SeqQuests

Building open bioinformatics software - using composable pieces.

Code is on GitHub.

GitHub

SeqQuests

Smith Waterman

Running for 36 hours the flagship module of SeqQuests performed an all-on-all Smith-Waterman comparison of UniProt Swiss-Prot (~570,000 sequences) finding many relationships between proteins in the process

Example Finding: Honeybee Prohormone-3 is annotated as membrane-bound. SeqQuests found it aligns with a secreted ant ortholog - suggesting the protein is secreted, not membrane-anchored. Proposed update:

CC   -!- SUBCELLULAR LOCATION: Secreted {ECO:0000250|UniProtKB:E2ADG2}.
CC   -!- SEQUENCE CAUTION: The sequence 1-88 may be artifactual. An 
CC       alternative translation initiation at Met-84 is supported by 
CC       RefSeq XP_001122204 and at Met-89 by sequence similarity to E2ADG2.
CC       {ECO:0000305}.
CC   -!- SIMILARITY: Belongs to the ITG-like peptide family.
CC       {ECO:0000305}.

Findings →

Additional Tools

The software library additionally includes work on:

  • Displaying sequence composition bias
  • Browsing Swiss-Prot feature tables with a domain viewer
  • Navigating a tree of protein similarities
  • Kabsch 3D alignment