Section: New Software and Platforms

VARNA (Visualization Application for RNA)

Participants : Yann Ponty [correspondant] , Alain Denise.

A lightweight Java Applet dedicated to the quick drawing of an RNA secondary structure. VARNA is open-source and distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL license. Automatically scales up and down to make the most out of a limited space. Can draw multiple structures simultaneously. Accepts a wide range of documented and illustrated options, and offers editing interactions. Exports the final diagrams in various file formats (svg,eps,jpeg,png,xfig) [52] ...

VARNA currently ships in its 3.9 version, and consists in $\sim$50 000 lines of code in $\sim$250 classes.

Availability : Distributed at http://varna.lri.fr since 2009 under the GPL v3 license.

Impact: Downloaded $\sim$15k times and cited by $\sim$250 research manuscripts (source: Google Scholar).