Sensitive protein alignments at tree-of-life scale using DIAMOND

• Published in: Nature methods Vol. 18; no. 4; pp. 366 - 368
• Main Authors: Buchfink, Benjamin, Reuter, Klaus, Drost, Hajk-Georg
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Nature Publishing Group US 01.04.2021; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/114; 631/114/2785; 631/1647/2217; 631/1647/514; 631/1647/794; Algorithms; Amino acid sequence; Bioinformatics; Biological Microscopy; Biological Techniques; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedical Engineering/Biotechnology; Brief Communication; Comparative analysis; Computational biology; Computational Biology - methods; Computer software industry; Diamonds; Forecasts and trends; Harnesses; Life Sciences; Management; Product enhancement; Proteins; Proteins - chemistry; Proteomics; Sequence Alignment; Technology application; United States
• ISSN: 1548-7091; 1548-7105; 1548-7105
• DOI: 10.1038/s41592-021-01101-x

We are at the beginning of a genomic revolution in which all known species are planned to be sequenced. Accessing such data for comparative analyses is crucial in this new age of data-driven biology. Here, we introduce an improved version of DIAMOND that greatly exceeds previous search performances and harnesses supercomputing to perform tree-of-life scale protein alignments in hours, while matching the sensitivity of the gold standard BLASTP. An updated version of DIAMOND uses improved algorithmic procedures and a customized high-performance computing framework to make seemingly prohibitive large-scale protein sequence alignments feasible.