| Much current biological interest revolves around "sequence features". In essence, a sequence feature is any characterization of a strecth of sequence. If I were to say bases 1 to 100 of sequence a is a promoter, I have created a sequence feature.
There are several xml formats out there for seq features, the two most closely associated with bioxml being the original(well, second version actually) GAME at http://www.bioxml.org/Projects/game and DASGFF at http://stein.cshl.org/das . To see a discussion of the relationship of these formats, checkout DasVsGame.
The bioxml feature - bx-feature:feature is directly descended from GAME. IT is simply a feature type, an optional description and a bx-feature:seq_relationship . The SeqRelationship? is where the feature gets all of it's smarts. It allows you to place a feature on the sequence at question and on other features that may be involved in the interaction. AN example of where this is useful is a blast hit. You can represent the hit on both the subject and query in one feature.
You can find the current FeatureDtd at http://www.bioxml.org/dtds/current/feature.dtd .
Related pages: Unclassified?
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