The Pintail program (Fig. 1) is a tool for detecting and analysing anomalies within a single 16S rRNA gene
sequence. It employs the Pintail
algorithm to compare a query sequence with a trusted (error-free)
subject sequence supplied by the user; the program works by comparing
evolutionary distances between query and subject over the
length of the 16S rRNA (small subunit rRNA) gene, by employing a
sampling window of specified size, progressing a fixed number of bases
at a time along the length of the gene. Pintail is released under
the
terms of the GNU General Public
Licence and is freely available from www.cardiff.ac.uk/biosi/research/biosoft/.
Figure 1. Screenshot of Pintail program (running in
MS
Windows XP).
