Ready made Perl scripts to manipulate biological data

There are currently six tool categories: Calculate, Change, Choose, Fetch, Merge, and Sort. Popular tools include:
– Choosing lines where the value in a given column exceeds a certain threshold. This can be especially useful with files larger than Excel’s limit of 65535 lines.
– Merging files together based on shared values in certain columns. This tool essentially performs a SQL join.
– Changing FASTA files to a tabular format. The output can be viewed in Excel, or filtered with other Scriptome tools.

Each tool is a short Perl script embedded in a one-line shell command. These tools can be cut and pasted from the website onto the command line. The tools’ simplicity makes it possible to develop tools rapidly, to keep up with biologists’ changing needs.

The Scriptome requires no installation at all on UNIX and Macintosh, since Perl is standard on those platforms. Windows users need only a one-click installation of Perl from ActiveState. A few tools also require Bioperl.