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. © 2011 Kehr et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
CITATION STYLE
Kehr, B., Weese, D., & Reinert, K. (2011). STELLAR: Fast and exact local alignments. BMC Bioinformatics, 12(SUPPL. 9). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-12-S9-S15
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