Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on June 3, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkn283
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xREI: a phylo-grammar visualization webserver
Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: lbarquist{at}gmail.com
Received February 9, 2008. Revised April 16, 2008. Accepted April 26, 2008.
Phylo-grammars, probabilistic models combining Markov chain substitution models with stochastic grammars, are powerful models for annotating structured features in multiple sequence alignments and analyzing the evolution of those features. In the past, these methods have been cumbersome to implement and modify. xrate provides means for the rapid development of phylo-grammars (using a simple file format) and automated parameterization of those grammars from training data (via the Expectation Maximization algorithm). xREI (pron. X-ray) is an intuitive, flexible AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) web interface to xrate providing grammar visualization tools as well as access to xrate's training and annotation functionality. It is hoped that this application will serve as a valuable tool to those developing phylo-grammars, and as a means for the exploration and dissemination of such models. xREI is available at http://harmony.biowiki.org/xrei/