Overseer: a nucleotide sequence searching tool

Overseer is a computer program that searches databases of nucleicacid sequences for objects of interest to the user. Such objectsmay consist of any number of simpler building blocks such asrepeats, palindromes or stem -loops, strings of particular baseswith or without mismatches, etc. Written in standard Pascal,this program runs under Unix and VMS and should also run underother operating systems. A simple interface allows the userto generate interactively a file containing a description ofthe target to be found. The searching program runs non-interactivety,processing the information from the file and searching the sequences.The results are output to a file. Search capabilities are quiteflexible and the code is designed to be modified. Since theframework of the program is simple, adding new modules to searchfor new target types as the need arises is possible.