As frequent visitors of this blog have already noticed, I am a big fan of different tools for data visualization. Today I would like to point you to java software called CLANS (CLuster ANalysis of Sequences) developed by my former colleague Tancred Frickey. CLANS runs (PSI)BLAST on your sequences, all vs all, and clusters them in 2D or 3D according to their similarity. This method allows for rapid classification of huge datasets and has the advantage over, lets say, phylogenetic tree, that one can quickly assess results of the clustering in a visual way (I cannot imagine making any sense of looking at phylogenetic tree with 1500 branches, while the graphical output, as on the animation below, is pretty easy to read).

Beauty of the idea behind CLANS is that you can apply this method almost to any dataset which can be translated into all-vs-all relations. CLANS page has examples from protein clustering, microarray analysis and (which I like the most) image showing how standard aminoacids cluster in space according to BLOSUM62.