The Gene Inspector allows you to create a number of different kinds of tables for use in analyses. The Gene Inspector's built-in table editor makes it easya.

1. Choose Analysis ➧ Tables ➧ Create New... and you will see a dialog like that shown in Figure 45. For this tutorial choose to create an empty nucleic acid table by selecting the items shown in the figure. In this case we will be creating a scoring table for aligning 2 sequences. The table we are creating is for nucleic acids, but the same procedure would be followed for amino acid tables as well. Press the New button when you are ready. If you had selected the Nucleotide Identity table in the list on the right, the values from the Nucleotide Identity table would be entered into the new table for you to modify. An <empty> table will be filled with zeros.

   Figure 45: Creating a New Table

    

2. Pressing the New button generates a nucleotide comparison table. This table contains all pairwise comparisons between nucleotide characters. We will create a table in which identities score 1 and matches between pyrimidines or between purines score 0.5. Mismatches will score 0.

   Figure 46: Nucleic Acid Table Editor

    

3. The GI table editor is designed to allow you to press the tab key to move through the table and enter values . As you type a value in one cell of the table and then tab to move to the next cell in the table, the same value is placed in the symmetrically located corresponding cell. In the figure, the selected cell is row 2, column 4, while the corresponding symmetric cell is row 4, column 2. Fill in the table to match that shown in Figure 46 by entering values and tabbing to the next cell.
4. You can adjust the width of any of the columns by placing the mouse cursor over one of the vertical table lines (the cursor will change shape) and then dragging left or right to move the dividing line. If you hold down the shift key when you drag the line, all columns in the table will be made the same width as the column just to the left of the line you are dragging. If you hold down the option/alt key while you drag to adjust the width, all columns in the table will be adjusted by the same amount (i.e. - the same number of pixels will be added to or removed from the width of each column in the table).
5. Press the Edit Info button to enter a Title for this new table. The new title you enter in the Info Dialog will appear in the title bar of the window.
6. Pressing OK will create a new table in the User Table folder which is found in the GI Data folder. This User Table will be available in any analysis for which the table is appropriate.