Sourmash Branchwater Enables Lightweight Petabyte-Scale Sequence Search
preprint
OA: closed
CC-BY-4.0
Abstract
We introduce branchwater, a flexible and fast petabase-scale search for the 767,000 public metagenomes presently in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive. Our search is based on the FracMinHash k-mer sketching technique and can search all public metagenomes with 1000 query genomes in approximately 36 hours using 50 GB of RAM and 32 threads. Branchwater is a Rust-based multithreading front-end built on top of the sourmash library. We provide biological use cases, examine performance, and discuss design and performance considerations.
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- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-19T01:45:01.086888+00:00
- unpaywall
- last seen: 2026-06-04T02:00:05.705006+00:00
License: CC-BY-4.0