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

Abstract

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.