Introduction

ACT (Artemis Comparison Tool) is a DNA sequence comparison viewer based on Artemis. In common with Artemis, ACT is written in Java and runs on UNIX, GNU/Linux, Macintosh and MS Windows systems. It can read complete EMBL and GENBANK entries or sequence in FASTA or raw format. Extra sequence features can be in EMBL, GENBANK or GFF format.

The sequence comparison displayed by ACT is usually the result of running a blastn or tblastx search. See the user manual for more information.

To see ACT in action go to the examples page. the Release 8 web pages.

Downloads

• Current stable release:
  ACT 8 Download  -  release 8 manual

• ACT archive
• Development version

Documentation

The user manual explains how to install and run ACT and what the most parts of the program do. The HTML files for the manual are also available as a zip file. If you have comments about the manual please send them to the ACT/Artemis developers or to the Artemis mailing list.

There is also a small list of frequently asked questions.

Development

The source code for the latest development release of ACT is available from the Sanger FTP site, for:

• UNIX
• MacOSX
• Windows

Alternatively if you have Java Web Start available try clicking below:

The Act and Artemis source code is also available from the Sanger Institute web CVS server in the artemis repository

Related Links

Two seperate ACT-related web sites have recently been developed.

WebACT was written by David Aanensen and James Abbott at Imperial College (see Abbott JC et al. 2007 for details). As well as generating custom comparison files, users can generate comparisons from specified EMBL entries and use a set of pre-computed whole genome comparisons. All comparison files can be downloaded for local use or viewed on the web using an ACT applet.

DoubleACT was written by Anthony Underwood and Jonathan Green at the Health Protection Agency and allows you to paste or upload sequences to generate ACT comparison files.

Mailing list

We welcome contributions to ACT and Artemis and suggestions for new features. An email discussion list is available for this purpose, see the artemis-users information page. Posts to the list since September 2001 are archived at mail-archive.com.

License

ACT is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It should run on any system with a recent version of Java, but is currently best supported on UNIX and GNU/Linux.

How to Cite ACT

Acknowledgments

The development of ACT and Artemis is funded by the Wellcome Trust's Beowulf Genomics initiative, through its support of the Pathogen Sequencing Unit.