Setting a preferred organism allows the user to quickly and conveniently perform tasks and apply bioinformatics tools to a selected organism.

• From the green Configure pull-down menu, select Set Preferred Organism.
• A new window will appear entitled Set / Change Preferred Organism (Figure 1), listing the available genomes. By default, the organisms are listed in alphabetical order. To more quickly locate an organism, it may be useful to sort by domain, then alphabetically by name. This can be done by clicking the “Sort the organisms below” drop down menu. While continuously pressing the left mouse button, position the pointer on the chosen sorting scheme and then release the button.
• Select the radio button of the chosen genome. Only one genome may be selected.
• Click the button near the top of the applet window marked Submit Organism Preference, and Close the selection applet window
• A new menu selection panel (brown) will appear below the green global menu panel, with the name of the organism selected (see Figure 1). Various useful organism-specific features can be launched from this menu panel ( e.g. statistics, whole-genome map viewer, graphical and textual views of the functional reconstructions).