VISTA is a collection of databases, tools, and servers that permit extensive comparative genomics analyses. The VISTA family of tools is developed and hosted at Genomics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This collaborative effort is supported by the Programs for Genomic Applications grant from the NHLBI/NIH and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Office of Science, US Department of Energy. Researchers can use the VISTA Browser to examine pre-computed alignments among a variety of species, or use the servers to submit sequences of their own--not limited by the species collection already in the database. rVISTA tools will assist scientists in the discovery of possible regulatory transcription factor binding sites in regions of their genes of interest. A database of tissue-specific human enhancers is available through VISTA Enhancer Browser. Discoveries of medical importance are enabled by the VISTA resources.

Below are the links for the tutorial suite for VISTA, including an online narrated tutorial, PowerPoint slides, slide handouts in PDF, and exercises.

Click here for technical information on using OpenHelix tutorial and training materials,
The materials and slides offered can not be resold or used for profit purposes. Reproduction, distribution and/or use is strictly limited to instructional purposes only and can not be used for for monetary gain or wide distribution. Copyright 2006, OpenHelix, LLC.

Citations for the VISTA database and related resources

• Visel A., Minovitsky S., Dubchak I. and Pennacchio L.A. (2007) VISTA Enhancer Browser—a database of tissue-specific human enhancers. Nucleic Acids Res. 35 (Database issue):D88-D92.
  
• Frazer K.A., Pachter L., Poliakov A., Rubin EM, Dubchak I. (2004) VISTA: computational tools for comparative genomics. Nucleic Acids Res. Jul 1;32 (Web Server issue):W273-9.
  
• Shah, N., Couronne, O., Pennacchio, L.A., Brudno, M., Batzoglou, S., Bethel, E.W., Rubin, E.M., Hamann, B. and Dubchak, I. (2004) Phylo-VISTA: interactive visualization of DNA multiple alignments. Bioinformatics 20(5):636-43.
  
• Couronne, O., Poliakov, A., Bray N., Ishkhanov T., Ryaboy D., Rubin E., Pachter L., Dubchak I. (2003) Strategies and Tools for Whole-Genome Alignments. Genome Res., 13:7.
  
• Loots G., Ovcharenko I., Pachter L., Dubchak I., Rubin, E. (2002) rVISTA for comparative sequence-based discovery of functional transcription factor binding sites. Genome. Res. 12:832-839.
  
• Dubchak I., Brudno M., Loots G. G., Mayor C., Pachter L., Rubin E. M. and Frazer K. A. (2000) Active Conservation of Noncoding Sequences Revealed by 3-way Species Comparisons. Genome Research, 10:1304.
  
• Mayor C., Brudno M., Schwartz J.R., Poliakov A., Rubin E. M., Frazer K.A., Pachter L.S. and Dubchak I. (2000) VISTA: Visualizing Global DNA Sequence Alignments of Arbitrary Length. Bioinformatics, 16:1046.
  

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