DIAMOND is a sequence aligner for protein and translated DNA searches,
designed for high performance analysis of big sequence data. The key
features are:
- Pairwise alignment of proteins and translated DNA at 500x-20,000x
speed of BLAST.
- Frameshift alignments for long read analysis.
- Low resource requirements and suitable for running on standard
desktops or laptops.
- Various output formats, including BLAST pairwise, tabular and XML,
as well as taxonomic classification.
To now run an alignment task, we assume to have a protein database file
in FASTA format named 'nr.faa' and a file of DNA reads that we want to
align named 'reads.fna'.
In order to set up a reference database for DIAMOND, the 'makedb'
command needs to be executed with the following command line:
$ diamond makedb --in nr.faa -d nr
This will create a binary DIAMOND database file with the specified name
('nr.dmnd'). The alignment task may then be initiated using the 'blastx'
command like this:
$ diamond blastx -d nr -q reads.fna -o matches.m8
The output file here is specified with the '-o' option and named
'matches.m8'. By default, it is generated in BLAST tabular format.
Publication:
Buchfink B, Xie C, Huson DH, "Fast and sensitive protein alignment using
DIAMOND", Nature Methods 12, 59-60 (2015). doi:10.1038/nmeth.3176
63daf9f79a