Introduction

BACKGROUND: Large-scale comparison of genomic sequences requires reliable tools for the search of local alignments. Practical local aligners are in general fast, but heuristic, and hence sometimes miss significant matches. RESULTS: We present here the local pairwise aligner STELLAR that has full sensitivity for ε-alignments, i.e. guarantees to report all local alignments of a given minimal length and maximal error rate. The aligner is composed of two steps, filtering and verification. We apply the SWIFT algorithm for lossless filtering, and have developed a new verification strategy that we prove to be exact. Our results on simulated and real genomic data confirm and quantify the conjecture that heuristic tools like BLAST or BLAT miss a large percentage of significant local alignments. CONCLUSIONS: STELLAR is very practical and fast on very long sequences which makes it a suitable new tool for finding local alignments between genomic sequences under the edit distance model. Binaries are freely available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X at http://www.seqan.de/projects/stellar. The source code is freely distributed with the SeqAn C++ library version 1.3 and later at http://www.seqan.de.

Publications

  1. STELLAR: fast and exact local alignments.
    Cite this
    Kehr B, Weese D, Reinert K, 2011-01-01 - BMC bioinformatics

Credits

  1. Birte Kehr
    Developer

  2. David Weese
    Developer

  3. Knut Reinert
    Investigator

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Summary
AccessionBT001786
Tool TypeApplication
Category
PlatformsLinux/Unix
TechnologiesC++
User InterfaceTerminal Command Line
Download Count0
Submitted ByKnut Reinert