Software#

FastaChar#

Open-source tool to extract molecular diagnostic characters for species descriptions

Fastachar is a graphical user interface to the fasta python module that allows a user to compare pre-aligned DNA sequences and determine molecular diagnostic characters for the description of species. The program and its source code (Python3.3+) are made available as open source under the GPLv3 license. The latest version of the code can be downloaded from the GitHub repository, or it can be installed from the python PyPi repository using pip (for python3). Version 0.2.4 of FastaChar, as described and used in the article “Make every species count: fastachar software for rapid determination of molecular diagnostic characters to describe species”, published in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources, can be downloaded from GitHub.

View on GitHub Documentation Web Application

Key features:

  • Easy-to-use software with a graphical interface

  • No knowledge of the underlying programming environment (Python) required

  • Can extract molecular diagnostic characters from one or several taxonomically informative DNA markers

  • Can be used in any species

  • Compares sequences of a chosen DNA marker of a selected taxon with those of other taxa in a single step

Contributing#

We welcome contributions to our software. If you have found a bug, have a feature request, or would like to contribute code, please open an issue or pull request on the relevant GitHub repository.

If you are using our software in your work and would like to discuss a collaboration or co-development, get in touch.

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