The owner of the copyright to dnatools, Carlsberg A/S, Copenhagen,
decided to terminate supporting dnatools and requested me to hand over the source
code as well as all additional information relating to dnatools when I left the
company May 1. 2002. Thenote
published by Carlsberg A/S specifically states that Carlsberg A/S do not wish to
continue supporting dnatools and that they have no plans for further
development of the program.
Software for sequence analysis do,
however, require continued maintenance to keep up with the dynamic
evolution of this field. Since my departure from Carlsberg, NCBI, for
example, terminated their support of the email-based blast search and
information retrieval with Entrez which served as the basis of the
automated sequence annotation functions, some of the very powerful
features of dnatools.
I decided to take advantage of the experience I have achieved over the past six years
from the work with dnatools to write a new software suite, SEQtools, for sequence analysis.
As Carlsberg A/S requested me to hand over the source code to
dnatools as well as my notes, backups etc., SEQtools has been written from scratch. This has been
a major task which is not yet fully completed. The program has, however, reached a state where I
believe it may serve as a useful replacement for dnatools.
I have enjoyed the pleasure of communicating with a large number
of dnatools users around the world from whom I have received invaluable support, inspiration and
help in improving the program over the years.
In writing the new software package, SEQtools, I have drawn
extensively on this information in trying to implement many of the proposals I have received from
patient users.
I wish to express my sincere thanks to my patient wife Nina Rasmussen, and to my daughter
Mette Fairgrieve and son Morten Wilken who helped me setting up the SEQtools homepage.
I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the staff at
NCBI who, in addition to providing the scientific community with high quality data and software,
also find the time to respond to user inquiries with a never failing kindness, patience and
competence.
I hope you will enjoy using SEQtools and that the same fruitful relationship between the author
and the users that was built while dnatools lived, can be revived with this software package.
Copenhagen, October 31., 2002