Package: muscle (1:5.1.0-1 and others)

Multiple alignment program of protein sequences

MUSCLE is a multiple alignment program for protein sequences. MUSCLE stands for multiple sequence comparison by log-expectation. In the authors tests, MUSCLE achieved the highest scores of all tested programs on several alignment accuracy benchmarks, and is also one of the fastest programs out there.

Muscle v5 is a major re-write of MUSCLE based on new algorithms.

Users should be aware that command line arguments compared to version 3.x of MUSCLE have changed!

Highest accuracy, scalable to thousands of sequences

Compared to previous versions, Muscle v5 is much more accurate, is often faster, and scales to much larger datasets. At the time of writing (late 2021), Muscle v5 has the highest scores on multiple alignment benchmarks including Balibase, Bralibase, Prefab and Balifam. It can align tens of thousands of sequences with high accuracy on a low-cost commodity computer (say, an 8-core Intel CPU with 32 Gb RAM). On large datasets, Muscle v5 is 20-30% more accurate than MAFFT and Clustal-Omega.

Alignment ensembles

Muscle v5 can generate ensembles of high-accuracy alternative alignments. All replicates have equal average accuracy on benchmark test, including the MSA made with default parameters. By comparing results of downstream analysis (trees, structure prediction...) on different replicates, you can assess the effects of alignment errors on your study.

Tags: Biology: Clustal/ALN, Proteins, Field: field::biology, field::biology:bioinformatics, Implemented in: implemented-in::c++, interface::commandline, Role: Program, Scope: Utility, Purpose: use::comparing, works-with-format::plaintext, Works with: Need an extra tag

This page is also available in the following languages (How to set the default document language):