EMBOSS is a freely available suite of bioinformatics applications and libraries. It can be downloaded via the internet, copied, customised, and passed on under the terms of the various General Public Licenses. EMBOSS has been developed in response to the need for a powerful, adaptable suite of software that can interface readily with many different situations and meet the need of professional bioinformaticists, particularly those needing high throughput and/or scriptable capabilities.
EMBOSS has primarily been developed by those responsible for the public extensions to the GCG package. EMBOSS supercedes much of EGCG and includes far better database interaction. EMBOSS also has the benefit of freely accessible source code so novel applications can be developed rapidly and at minimal cost.
EMBOSS is currently only available for Unix/Linux systems but it has been known to compile and run on Windows NT. This document will only consider the UNIX version and will assume the reader has some familiarity with UNIX system administration.