A Macintosh program for the versatile generation of random nucleic acid sequences and their structural analysis

The program ‘MacStAn’ for the Apple Macintosh generatesrandom sequences and can analyze their tendency to form secondarystructure or translation products as well as their mono-, di-and trinucleotide composition. Generation of random sequencesis versatile in that one can (i) predefine the G + C content,maximal base repetitions and constant regions; (ii) preset theentire dinucleotide composition; or (iii) shuffle an existingsequence. The program constitutes an integrated package witha graphical user interface, fill-featured editing, saving, printing,text import and export, dot plot and sequence alignment.