MetaLogo Tutorial

Introduction

MetaLogo is a tool for making sequence logos. A sequence logo is a graphical representation of the sequence conservation of nucleotides or amino acids (From wikipedia). For each site, the base (nucleotides or amino acids) frequencies or information contents (Thomas, 1986) are calculated. The higher the base, the more conservative it is.

There are several popular sequence logo making tools, such as WebLogo, Seq2Logo, LogoMaker, ggseqlogo and so on. However, most of them do not support sequences with varied length as input, which means users can only make sequence logo for sequences with a same length. In actual scenarios, we sometimes need to check sequence patterns with all possible lengths in a sample. For example, CDR3 of B cell receptors could target to different antigens when having different lengths. Besides, sometimes we need to check if two groups of sequences have similar patterns or motifs. Thus, we developed MetaLogo, which allows users group sequences into different groups, according to lengths or others characteristics, then draw multiple sequence logos in one figure and align sequence logos to highlight the potential conserved patterns among different groups.

MetaLogo provides several beautiful and useful layouts for multiple sequence logos, which gives people more choices for motif and pattern visualization. By developing convenient web sever, we also tried to help researchers who have no coding experiences to make satisfactory sequences logos.