Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference

January 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Easy Perl Programming Using VECT: The Visual Extraction And Conversion Tool

Hui-Hsien Chou

  Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-3223, USA

VECT, the Visual Extraction and Conversion Tool, is designed to help biologists easily create Perl programs to handle the large amount of data in their research without having already learned the Perl programming language. VECT observes, via a graphical user interface, the visual extraction and conversion steps conducted by users on sample data also provided by the users. After that, it can automatically create Perl programs that can replicate the same data extraction and conversion steps. The generated Perl programs can then be saved and operated on other similar data without having to run VECT again. VECT is a great enabling tools for biologists and can be freely downloaded from http://www.complex.iastate.edu. VECT runs on all major computing platforms including Windows, MacOS X and Linux, and is being developed under the National Institutes of Health Grant 4R33GM066400.