EMBOSS is "The European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite". EMBOSS is a free Open Source software analysis package specially developed for the needs of the molecular biology (e.g. EMBnet) user community. The software automatically copes with data in a variety of formats and even allows transparent retrieval of sequence data from the web. Also, as extensive libraries are provided with the package, it is a platform to allow other scientists to develop and release software in true open source spirit. EMBOSS also integrates a range of currently available packages and tools for sequence analysis into a seamless whole. EMBOSS breaks the historical trend towards commercial software packages. Within EMBOSS you will find around hundreds of programs (applications) covering areas such as: - Sequence alignment - Rapid database searching with sequence patterns - Protein motif identification, including domain analysis - Nucleotide sequence pattern analysis -- for example to identify CpG islands or repeats - Codon usage analysis for small genomes - Rapid identification of sequence patterns in large scale sequence sets - Presentation tools for publication Optional, run-time dependencies are clustalw and primer3 -- needed if you want to use the wrappers emma and eprimer32. For details and citation: EMBOSS: The European Molecular Biology Open Software Suite (2000) Rice,P. Longden,I. and Bleasby,A. Trends in Genetics 16, (6) pp276-277