Vista Genome Browser from Inna Dubchak's Group

In an earlier commentary on Browsers for Viewing NGS Data, we complained about high cost of commercial license of Vista browser and tools based on site-license costs posted on their website. Dr. Dubchak kindly pointed out that those prices were for an old and obsolete version of Vista, and the latest version of software is freely available to everyone.

Her email copied below provides more information on those excellent bioinformatics tools -

We would like to clarify what all VISTA tools are designed for.

We have several downloadable tools to work on users computers.

1. GenomeVISTA 2.0, released in 2012. ( http://pipeline.lbl.gov/software.shtml) - whole-genome alignment pipeline that includes GUI and visualization tool VISTA Point. This Web site gives access to both a source and executables.

Its free for everybody.

2. mVISTA package, released in 2000. ( http://genome.lbl.gov/vista/mvista/download.shtml )

It includes an alignment program AVID and a stand-alone original

visualization program VISTA. 10 years ago LBNL required charging a fee from commercial users.

This package is currently obsolete. All its capabilities are included in the GenomeVISTA 2.0 plus many more have been added.

Java-based VISTA Browser is an on-line tool that is not distributed, it has been superseded by the VISTA Point tool we are distributing now (see item 1).

We also asked about license agreement of source code, because the top part of the link was not clear to us. Is the US government holding license for derivative work for five years?

Dr. Dubchak replied:

I don’t understand this legalese either, but this standard text suggest to contact our LBNL Technology licensing office if you have any questions. I believe it’s something that needs to be mentioned in the post.