BSML

Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Language ( BSML ) is an extensible markup language ( XML ) derived standard that “encodes biological sequence information and includes graphical representations of biologically meaningful objects such as sequences, genes, electrophoresis gels, and multiple alignments”.

A detailed BSML overwiev is available here whereas the FAQ page is here.

The last BSML DTD release ( 3.1 ), the BSML reference manual and tutorial are available here. A BSML presentation is also avaible ( pdf, ppt ).

You can manage BSML file with LabBook Java Genomic XML Viewer, that is freely available, or you can purchase LabBook Genomic Workspace.

BioBar, a bioinformatic firefox plug-in

FireFox, the well known open source web browser, now is useful also for bioinformatic web surfers. Biobar is a new plug-in that provides rapid and easy access to several bioinformatic databases, directly whitin firefox.

"The primary advantage of this tool is that it allows a biologist to browse and retrieve data from Genomic, Proteomic, Functional, Literature, Taxonomic, Structural, Plant and Animal-specific databases".

Biobar also has several links to the major bioinformatics sites including European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) and other important databases for nucleotide, protein, 3D-structure data, sequence, structure alignment and analysis tools.

The complete list of resources currently accessible through biobar is listed here.

You can install the latest biobar release ( 1.4 ) from here.