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Center for Protein and Nucleic Acid Research

Different Types of Data Files

There are three different file types which we distribute; the .seq file, the .pdf file, and the .ab1 file.

.pdf file - This is the Adobe file, which can be opened by Adobe Acrobat Reader or other Adobe software. In the comment section on the first page will be a description of our analysis of your sequencing data. The comments and abbreviations in this section describe the result of your sequencing data and whether or not we are going to do anything further with your sample (see the section on DNA comments).

.seq file - This is a text file containing only your sequence data and not the chromatogram. This file can also be imported into sequencing analysis programs, like Sequencher, but you will be unable to view the chromatograms of the sequence.

.ab1 file - (that is a one, not an L) This used to be the .dna file, it is now the .ab1 file. It can be viewed with either "EditView" software for Macs or the "Chromas" software for PCs, or with Sequencher or other programs you may have. You can also view our comments and signal intensities in this file with Editview by clicking on the little "A" in the bottom corner of the window with your chromatogram. This will bring up the annotations to the file. Unfortunately, you can not view the annotations with Chromas and must look in the ".pdf" file.