The Eland Short Read Aligner

Eland is a computer program that aligns short oligonucleotides against a reference genome. It is written by Anthony Cox from the Illumina company. The source codes are freely available to machine buyers. Eland is the first program for short read alignment and it profoundly influences most of its successors.
Algorithm
Eland guarantees full sensitivity for hits with [...]

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The Best Multialignment Program?

Popular multialignment programs include: clustalw, T-coffee, dialign [PMID: 18505568, 10222408], muscle [PMID: 15318951], MAFFT [PMID: 18372315], probcons [PMID: 15687296] and probalign [PMID: 16954142]. Which is the best in practice? You can find various benchmarks in the papers listed above. I only summarize based on my understanding. It is recommended to read their papers in case [...]

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Biased Benchmarks on Short Read Aligners: ZOOM

ZOOM [PMID:18684737] is still unavailable even when the manuscript goes online. For the time being, there is no way to confirm whether their benchmarks are unbiased. Fortunately, we can collect some information from what they have presented. In the ZOOM paper, the authors give the memory consumption of ZOOM. It is 2.9GB for 12 million [...]

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Classification of Pairwise Sequence Search Algorithms

Definition of Pairwise Sequence Search (PSS)
Roughly speaking, given two sets of sequences A and B, the pairwise sequence search (PSS) problem is to find the high-scoring matches between each pair of sequences, one from each set. PSS can, but not necessaily, be done by performing pairwise alignment between each pair of sequences and then retaining [...]

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