Patent ID: 7805252

Claim:
A computer program product for use in conjunction with a computer system, the computer program product comprising a tangible computer readable storage medium and a computer program mechanism embedded therein, the computer program mechanism for designing and manipulating a set of sequence elements in order to design a design nucleic acid sequence, the computer program mechanism comprising: (I) instructions for representing the set of sequence elements on a display, each sequence element representing an amino acid sequence segment or a nucleic acid sequence segment, wherein the set of sequence elements collectively encode the design nucleic acid sequence, wherein said instructions for representing said set of sequence elements comprise instructions for displaying a plurality of icons in a linear or a near linear arrangement on a display, each respective icon in said plurality of icons uniquely representing a corresponding sequence element in said set of sequence elements such that neighboring icons in said plurality of icons represent neighboring sequence elements in said plurality of sequence elements in said design nucleic acid sequence, and each said respective icon in said plurality of icons depicts a directional property for the corresponding sequence element in said set of sequence elements; and (II) instructions for permitting a user to rearrange an order of the icons on a display thereby causing a corresponding change in the nucleic acid sequence of the design nucleic acid sequence.