For this weeks sessions of my phyloinformatics course I'm developing some phylogeny tools. The first is a simple AJAX-based BLAST tool. I've always wanted a quick way to see a GenBank sequence in its phylogenetic context, so I've built a simple tool to that takes a GenBank accession number or GI number, submits a BLAST job, retrieves the sequences, aligns them using CLUSTALW, builds a quick and dirty neighbour-joining tree using PAUP*, then displays the tree using SVG (if your browser doesn't support this you won't see the tree). One use for this is to quikcly get a sense of whether an unnamed ("dark") taxon is related to sequences that have been identified.
Nothing fancy, but it was a chance to display the whole process in the browser without opening new windows or refreshing the page. Here's an example for the GenBank sequence FJ559186:
For the technically-minded, the calls to BLAST and the alignment and tree construction tools all use AJAX, and there's a simple Javascript timer to countdown the seconds that the NCBI BLAST web service estimates the BLAST job will take, before we poll NCBI to see if the job has in fact finished. The code is in GitHub.
