BioBloom tools: Fast, accurate and memory-efficient host species sequence screening using bloom filters

Abstract

Large datasets can be screened for sequences from a specific organism, quickly and with low memory requirements, by a data structure that supports time- and memory-efficient set membership queries. Bloom filters offer such queries but require that false positives be controlled. We present BioBloom Tools, a Bloom filter-based sequence- screening tool that is faster than BWA, Bowtie 2 (popular alignment algorithms) and FACS (a membership query algorithm). It delivers accuracies comparable with these tools, controls false positives and has low memory requirements.