Molecular biologists work with databases that often include entire genomes. A common requirement is to search a DNA database to find exact matches for a nondegenerate or partially degenerate query. The software programs available for such purposes are normally designed to run on remote servers, but an appealing alternative is to work with DNA databases stored on local computers. We developed a desktop software program termed MICA (K-Mer Indexing with Compact Arrays) that allows large DNA databases to be searched efficiently using very little memory.

MICA is primarily intended to be incorporated into other software as an indexing and search engine. For the purpose of allowing researchers to evaluate the capabilities of this program, a simple graphical user interface was constructed. Available for download are Mac OS X and Windows executable versions of MICA.

The development of MICA is described in BMC Bioinformatics 2006, 7:427 link

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