Software for sequence data

Part of being efficient in a lab is find the best ways to organize your data. Scientist Mother has a post up about the best ways to organize the PDF files we all have scattered all over the place and a few people have mentioned the program Papers (Mac only, PCs get the short stick again). I've started playing around with it and it seems like a decent program that may be helpful, which got me thinking about data organization in general.

Every lab has their way of doing things and often get entrenched in using certain programs for reasons ranging from "It does what we want it to and we've all learned it" to "It's what our PI uses so we have to generate files in this program so he / she can read them". I've been through enough labs doing things differently that I wanted to figure out the best way for my lab going forward when I first set up, without the constraints of having software already established. In some cases I found new software and in others I stuck with what I knew because it seemed to fit my needs the best. However, in one area I made such a huge discovery that I thought I would share it.

If you handle any type of sequence data at all and are not using this program, you are making your life more difficult than it should be. Trust me on this and give it a try if you have a use for such a program. I promise that you will go from using multiple different programs in order to get things done to being able to do it all with Geneious. I don't have any ties to this company other than being extremely happy with their software, so give it a whirl and don't say I never gave you anything.