WOBB.C: a portable software package for defining and searching ambiguous sequence patterns.

WOBB.C is a set of C-written programs designed to build and manipulate ambiguous sequence patterns and to locate them within collections of protein or nucleotide sequences. The search module involves the perceptron algorithm introduced by Stormo et al. (1982) [Nucleic Acids Res 10:2997-3011] in the context of biosequence analysis. The originality of WOBB.C resides in its portability and in a flexible interface, allowing the definition of patterns in three different ways: automatically, from a multi-alignment; interactively, from a character string, or from an explicit text file script.