Protein-to-genome alignment with miniprot

Abstract

Motivation: Protein-to-genome alignment is critical to annotating genes in non-model organisms. While there are a few tools for this purpose, all of them were developed over 10 years ago and did not incorporate the latest advances in alignment algorithms. They are inefficient and could not keep up with the rapid production of new genomes and quickly growing protein databases. Results: Here, we describe miniprot, a new aligner for mapping protein sequences to a complete genome. Miniprot integrates recent techniques such as k-mer sketch and vectorized dynamic programming. It is tens of times faster than existing tools while achieving comparable accuracy on real data.