FSTVAL: a new web tool to validate bulk flanking sequence tags

We present an open access web tool, flanking sequence tags validator (FSTVAL), to manage bulk flanking sequence tags (FSTs). FSTVAL automatically evaluates the FSTs and finds the best mapping positions of the FST against a known genome sequence. The statistics, in terms of genic and intergenic regions, are presented as a table, a distribution map, and a frequency graph along the chromosomes. Currently, 17 plant genome sequences, including Arabidopsis thaliana, Oryza sativa, and Glycine max, are available as reference genomes. We evaluated the utility and accuracy of the tool with 5,144 rice FSTs. The whole process, from uploading the sequences to generating tables of insertions, required a few minutes, with less than 4 clicks in the web environment.Run for 1？year and tested over 1,000 times, we have confirmed FSTVAL efficiently handles bulk FSTs. FSTVAL is freely available without login at http://bioinfo.mju.ac.kr/fstval/ webcite.