First BioSharp App – RestrictionFinder

I’ve started work on my first application that uses BioSharp.  It is called RestrictionFinder, and its purpose is to help find a pair of restriction enzymes that give distinct cleavage patterns when an insert is present in a plasmid in the forward direction, reverse direction, or absent.  It also has the ability to limit the search to pairs of enzymes with compatible buffers.

Here is a screen shot of the sequence entry form:

Sequence Entry Form

If the sequence contains uppercase and lowercase, the lowercase is assumed to be the insert, and the start/end positions are set automatically.

As part of the solution, I needed a small database (just a file, really) of enzymes and their buffers.  I could not find a readily available file for this, so I wrote a small console app that extracts the data from the REBASE web site.

This is still a work in progress, but the source code is checked into the BioSharp SVN repository.