What is CGAT ?

CGAT is a Comparative Genome Analysis Tool that was developed for detailed comparison of closely related bacterial-sized genomes, mainly for analysis of complex evolutionary changes between two related genomes. CGAT visualizes precomputed pairwise genome alignments on both dotplot and alignment viewers. Users can put several information on this alignment, such as existence of tandem repeats or interspersed repetitive sequences and changes in codon usage bias, to facilitate interpretation of the observed genomic changes. Besides visualization functionalities, CGAT also provides a general framework to process genome-scale alignments using various existent alignment programs such as BLAST/MegaBlast, FASTA, MUMmer, Blat and BlastZ.

Basically, CGAT employs a client-server architecture, which consists of AlignmentViewer (client; a Java application) and DataServer (a set of Perl scripts). The DataServer consists of data construction scripts and CGI scripts and AlignmentViewer obtains the data from the server thorough the HTTP protocol. AlignmentViewer can also obtain data from the local file system when the server and client are installed on the same machine.