What bioinformatics tools are out there?#
There are more bioinformatics tools, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy ~ William Shakespeare, if he were a bioinformatician
The best way to find bioinformatics tools is to comb through papers and look for the link to the software implementation. Many bioinformatics journals require the source code to be publicly available on repositories such as GitHub and Bitbucket. If you are just starting out on an area, it may be helpful to first be acquainted with the lay of the land by reading survey papers.
There are dedicated repositories for bioinformatics tools such as bio.tools. Nucleic Acids Research also publishes an annual issue on bioinformatics web servers (read the 2024 issue here).
With the plethora of available tools, shortlisting tools can be a challenge. Here is a guide to tool selection:
Below are some of the tools that have been used by our lab for common bioinformatics tasks. This list is only intended to be a starting point. Our understanding of life evolves, novel approaches are introduced, and new tools are developed every day.
Sequence Alignment#
BLAST
LAST
Website: mcfrith/last
Sequence Clustering#
CD-HIT
MMseqs2
Website: soedinglab/MMseqs2
Protein Structure Prediction#
AlphaFold
ColabFold
Website: https://colab.research.google.com/github/sokrypton/ColabFold/blob/main/AlphaFold2.ipynb
For local installation: YoshitakaMo/localcolabfold
Protein Structure Alignment#
US-align
Protein Structure Searching and Clustering#
Foldseek
Sequence Collection#
Phages
INPHARED
Gene Prediction#
Prokaryotes
Prodigal
Genome Annotation#
Viruses
PHROG