BWA Insights | Sumble

What is BWA?

Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) is a software package for mapping relatively short DNA sequences against a large reference genome, such as the human genome. It is commonly used in bioinformatics for tasks like variant calling, genome resequencing, and identifying structural variations in DNA sequences. BWA uses the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) to efficiently compress and index the reference genome, allowing for fast and accurate alignment of sequencing reads even with mismatches and gaps.

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What other technologies are related to BWA?

BWA Competitor Technologies

Bowtie

Bowtie is another alignment tool, and is a direct competitor to BWA. It is often used for shorter reads.

mentioned alongside BWA in 21% (70) of relevant job posts

BLAST

BLAST is another alignment tool, and is a direct competitor to BWA. BLAST is typically used for comparing nucleotide or protein sequences, while BWA is optimized for aligning sequencing reads to a reference genome.

mentioned alongside BWA in 10% (88) of relevant job posts

STAR

STAR is an aligner specifically designed for RNA sequencing data. It is a competitor to BWA, especially in the context of RNA-seq.

mentioned alongside BWA in 4% (143) of relevant job posts

BWA Complementary Technologies

GATK

GATK is a widely used toolkit for variant discovery in high-throughput sequencing data, often used downstream of alignment tools like BWA.

mentioned alongside BWA in 57% (413) of relevant job posts

samtools

Samtools is a suite of tools for manipulating and analyzing SAM/BAM files, which are the standard output format for BWA. It is essential for processing BWA's output.

mentioned alongside BWA in 52% (306) of relevant job posts

bedtools

Bedtools is used for a wide range of genomic arithmetic operations. It operates on coordinate-based data and is useful for analyzing alignments generated by BWA.

mentioned alongside BWA in 46% (92) of relevant job posts