IMEx: Imperfect Microsatellite Extractor

摘要

Motivation: Microsatellites, also known as simple sequence repeats, are the tandem repeats of nucleotide motifs of the size 1–6 bp found in every genome known so far. Their importance in genomes is well known. Microsatellites are associated with various disease genes, have been used as molecular markers in linkage analysis and DNA fingerprinting studies, and also seem to play an important role in the genome evolution. Therefore, it is of importance to study distribution, enrichment and polymorphism of microsatellites in the genomes of interest. For this, the prerequisite is the availability of a computational tool for extraction of microsatellites (perfect as well as imperfect) and their related information from whole genome sequences. Examination of available tools revealed certain lacunae in them and prompted us to develop a new tool.