1. Select data - You can either select names
of data items, or the data themselves. Selecting names is done
in the name panel. Click on a single name, or drag across a
set of adjacent names. Names can also be chosen one by one by
holding the Shift key and clicking on names. Each time you
click, a name is either selected or deselected. Data can also
be selected in the alignment window. You can select a block of
subsequences from an alignment by dragging horizontally and
vertically in the alignment window.
2.
Choose a program
- Once data are selected, choose a program from one of the
menus. A parameter menu for that program will pop up.
3.
Set Parameters
- The parameter menu lets you specify parameters for running
the program. For example, a menu for a pairwise sequence
alignment program might give you a choice of scoring matrices
to use, or to choose whether or not gaps at the end of an
alignment should be assigned a penalty score.
4.
Launch the program
- All menus have an OK button. When you click on this button,
the selected data will be written to an input file to be used
by the program. If data have been selected in both the name
panel and the alignment panel, you will be prompted to choose
whether you wish to use the "selected sequences" or the
"selected regions".
BioLegato will run the program using the selected data and the
specified parameters. When the program is finished, output
will pop up in windows, or if specified in the parameter menu,
written to a file.
When output is displayed on the screen, it is displayed using
a program appropriate for the output. If output is text, it
will be opened in a text editor; PDF output would be displayed
in a PDF viewer (eg. Adobe Acrobat); HTML output would be
displayed in a web browser. When output is data that could be
read into bioLegato (eg. sequence data, phylogenetic trees,
lists of accession numbers etc.), it will be launched in a new
BioLegato instance window.
5. Work
with output - When output goes to a new
BioLegato instance, each work cycle gives you a large array
of methods for further work. This approach of ad hoc
pipelining means that there are seldom dead ends, because
the data remain machine-readable.