MView reformats the results of a sequence database search (BLAST, FASTA, etc) or a multiple alignment (MSF, PIR, CLUSTAL, etc) adding optional HTML markup to control colouring and web page layout. It can also be used as a filter to extract and convert searches or alignments to common formats.
MView is implemented in Perl, version 5 as a self-contained command line program that should run cross-platform.
The latest version of the software can be downloaded from the SourceForge MView project as a UNIX/Linux bzipped or gzipped tar archive.
Save the archive to your software area, e.g., /usr/local, then uncompress and extract it using of these methods, depending on which archive format you downloaded.
For the bzipped archive, one of:
tar xvjf mview-1.59.tar.bz2
bunzip2 < mview-1.59.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
For the gzipped archive, one of:
tar xvzf mview-1.59.tar.gz
gunzip < mview-1.59.tar.gz | tar xvf -
This would create a directory called mview-1.59 and place all the files under there.
Change to this directory and load bin/mview into an editor.
Set a Perl interpreter path valid for your machine after the ‘#!’ magic number.
Change the use lib 'path/to/my/lib'; line to, in our example:
use lib '/usr/local/mview-1.59/lib';
Finally, add mview to somewhere on your PATH and rehash or login again.
Ask your system manager or a Perl guru for help if this looks weird.
Please send an email to biomview _at_ gmail.com. If MView isn’t able to parse your input file or produces a warning message, it would be very helpful if you can include/attach the data file in your email so that I can (1) quickly reproduce the error, and (2) add the example to the test suite.
If you use MView in your work, please cite:
Brown, N.P., Leroy C., Sander C. (1998). MView: A Web compatible database search or multiple alignment viewer. Bioinformatics. 14(4):380-381. PubMed
MView and associated libraries are Open Source Software with copyright protected under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
People who contributed early code or suggestions include C. Leroy and other members of the former Sander group at EBI. Useful suggestions relating to the EBI sequence database search services have come from R. Lopez, W. Li and H. McWilliam at EBI. Many other people have suggested new features and reported bugs; I hope I have acknowledged them in the change log and apologise if I have missed anyone out.