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Saraswathi Abhiman (NCBI, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda MD, 20894 USA)
Multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) are essential for analyzing DNA, RNA and protein sequences. Tools for visualizing alignments with additional annotation and markup are necessary for easier understanding and interpretation of this data. Even though many tools for visualizing MSAs are available, most of them do not provide controls necessary for automated figure generation and are outdated. I have developed a command-line program ALN2SVG in Perl, which takes an MSA (Text file) as input and outputs SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) code, which can then be visualized with any renderer of SVG, including most web browsers and converted to other formats like PNG, PDF, EPS etc used in journal publications by using open source tools like Inkscape. ALN2SVG can be used to color residues in the alignment, depict secondary structure elements as schematics graphics, plotting sequence logos, plotting quantitative information as graphs, highlight active sites and motifs with symbols and many other representations of MSA. The output of ALN2SVG, when displayed in a web browser gives the user additional features such as clickable sequence names and other mouse-over effects.