SUMMARY: SmashCommunity is a stand-alone metagenomic annotation and analysis pipeline suitable for data from Sanger and 454 sequencing technologies. It supports state-of-the-art software for essential metagenomic tasks such as assembly and gene prediction. It provides tools to estimate the quantitative phylogenetic and functional compositions of metagenomes, to compare compositions of multiple metagenomes and to produce intuitive visual representations of such analyses. AVAILABILITY: SmashCommunity is freely available at http://www.bork.embl.de/software/smash CONTACT: bork@embl.de.

SUMMARY: Recent advances in single-cell manipulation technology, whole genome amplification and high-throughput sequencing have now made it possible to sequence the genome of an individual cell. The bioinformatic analysis of these genomes however is far more complicated than the analysis of those generated using traditional, culture-based methods. In order to simplify this analysis we have developed SmashCell (Simple Metagenomics Analysis SHell-for sequences from single Cells). It is designed to automate the main steps in microbial genome analysis - assembly, gene prediction, functional annotation - in a way that allows parameter and algorithm exploration at each step in the process. It alsomanages the data created by these analyses and provides visualisation methods to allow rapid analysis of the results. AVAILABILITY: The SmashCell source code and a comprehensive manual are available at http://asiago.stanford.edu/SmashCell CONTACT: eoghanh@stanford.edu.

SUMMARY: Sircah is a flexible tool for the detection, analysis and visualisation of alternative transcripts. It takes as input gene models or spliced alignments and creates a database of alternative transcription events: alternative transcription initiation and polyadenylation, alternative 3' and 5' splice-site usage, skipped exons and retained introns. The results can be visualised in a variety of ways, allowing the creation of publication quality images. RESULTS: AVAILABILITY: The Sircah is available for download under a creative commons license along with additional documentation and a tutorial from http://www.bork.embl.de/Sircah. CONTACT: bork@embl.de.