TOPAZ: asymmetric suffix array neighbourhood search for massive protein databases

Protein homology search is an important, yet time-consuming, step in everything from protein annotation to metagenomics. Its application, however, has become increasingly challenging, due to the exponential growth of protein databases. In order to perform homology search at the required scale, many methods have been proposed as alternatives to BLAST that make an explicit trade-off between sensitivity and speed. One such method, SANSparallel, uses a parallel implementation of the suffix array neighbourhood search (SANS) technique to achieve high speed and provides several modes to allow for greater sensitivity at the expense of performance.Peer reviewe