Frequently asked questions

Can MView extract BLAST (or other) output into a FASTA/PIR/MSF/CLUSTAL file?

Yes - MView extracts and converts results into FASTA, PIR, MSF and CLUSTAL/aln formats. See Output formats.

Does MView work with nucleotide sequences?

Yes - use one of the -moltype dna, -moltype rna or -moltype na options to tell MView to use an appropriate colour scheme for HTML output (currently, these three options are equivalent).

Can MView use CLUSTAL colours?

Yes - use the -colormap CLUSTAL option to change the colourmaps for both protein and nucleotide alignments.

Can MView process data from a Web page?

Basically, no, unless you are lucky or prepared to edit the Web page. The MView parsers are all built to recognise the raw text output produced by the respective programs (BLAST, FASTA, etc.) or to recognise particular flat-file formats (MSF, PIR, etc.). When a site adds HTML markup to this to make a Web page, arbitrary parts are changed/deleted/added polluting the text, so that even dumping the page in text-only format still leaves traces.

Can I switch off HTML markup?

Yes - the program defaults to plain text output unless the -html option is set to any valid value other than off, or the output format is set to PIR, MSF, FASTA, or RDB.

How can I print?

From the web browser. To produce something that fits on typical paper sizes one must set -width 60 or similar and turn off some of the leading text, e.g., -label2 -label3.

Can I edit the alignment?

No - MView isn’t an alignment editor. You could try to copy/paste the output into a spreadsheet and process it there, then reload it into MView.

Can MView extract or view the alternative BLAST alignments or HSPs?

Yes - MView normally displays or extracts only the top scoring alignments or HSPs for the query. You can get all alignments and/or HSPs using the -hsp discrete option.

Important: see Why are some sequence symbols lowercased? and Can I extract BLAST hits complete with insertions? for more information on extracting complete HSPs.

Why are some sequence symbols lowercased?

Gapped input (e.g., FASTA, BLAST2, PSI-BLAST) is subject to a further processing step when producing the stacked alignment. The query sequence acts as a template, but any insertions in the database hit sequences that would introduce a gap in the query are excised to ensure a contiguous query string and maintain the stacked alignment. The position of the excision in the affected hit is marked by lowercasing the pair of boundary symbols.

It is possible to override this behaviour in a limited fashion with BLAST input (see Can I extract BLAST hits complete with insertions?).

Can I extract BLAST hits complete with insertions?

If you want to extract BLAST hits without insertions relative to the query being excised (see Why are some sequence symbols lowercased?), you can do this with the -keepinserts on option.

Note: because the multiple sequence output would no longer be aligned to the query, you can only do this in conjunction with one of the unaligned output modes: -out fasta or -out pir to dump the hits.

Note: filtering using -range x:y to extract a range of alignment columns is silently ignored with -keepinserts on.

Why is the query sequence incomplete?

The displayed query sequence is assembled from the input data, not by reference to any external sequence database. MView will pad missing query sequence with ‘X’ characters based on the numeric match ranges if this is needed to complete an assembly. Occasionally, you may see a ‘?’ character - this means that a non-standard residue was seen on input.

How are overlapping BLAST HSPs processed?

Ungapped BLAST input is processed to produce a stack of hit sequence strings aligned against a contiguous query sequence. The query sequence acts as a template for each hit sequence onto which hit fragments are overlayed in the query positions.

In outline the default method of processing of HSPs is as follows:

For BLAST (series 1), as of MView version 1.37, only the HSPs contributing to the ranked hit contribute to this overlay process. A sorting scheme ensures that the best of these fragments are overlayed last and are not obscured by weaker ones, for example, BLAST hits are sorted by score and length. Differences of ordering of fragments along query and hit naturally result in a patchwork that may not correspond exactly to the real hit sequences. Nevertheless, the resulting alignment stack is very informative, and the user can always run and view a gapped search if that is preferred.

For BLAST (series 2) and PSI-BLAST, often only a single gapped alignment is reported by blast for a given database hit. However, sometimes there are alternative alignments and the same stacking rules apply.

Greater control over the choice of HSPs is available through the -hsp option. See BLAST HSP processing rules for more details.