RSAT 2018: Regulatory Sequence Analysis Tools 20th Anniversary

Nguyen NTT*, Contreras-Moreira B*, Castro-Mondragon JA, Santana-Garcia W, Ossio R, Robles-Espinoza CD, Collombet S, Vincens P, Thieffry D, van Helden J, Medina-Rivera A, Thomas-Chollier M (2018) RSAT 2018: Regulatory Sequence Analysis Tools 20th Anniversary. Nucl Acids Res,

RSAT (Regulatory Sequence Analysis Tools) is a suite of modular tools for the detection and the analysis of cis-regulatory elements in genome sequences. Its main applications are (i) motif discovery, including from genome-wide datasets like ChIP-seq/ATAC-seq, (ii) motif scanning and enrichment, (iii) motif analysis (quality assessment, comparisons and clustering), (iv) analysis of regulatory variations, (v) comparative genomics. Six public servers jointly support 10,000 genomes from all kingdoms. Seven novel or refactored programs have been added since the 2015 NAR Web Software Issue, including updated programs to analyse regulatory variants (retrieve-variation-seq, variation-scan, convert-variations), an original threshold-free approach for motif enrichment, tools to extract sequences from a list of coordinates (retrieve-seq-bed), to select motifs from motif collections (retrieve-matrix), and to extract orthologs based on Ensembl Compara (get-orthologs-compara). This Anniversary update gives a 20-years perspective on the software suite. The software suite is well-documented and available through Web sites, SOAP/WSDL (Simple Object Access Protocol/Web Services Description Language) web services, virtual machines and stand-alone programs at http://www.rsat.eu/.