GraphAligner: Rapid and Versatile Sequence-to-Graph Alignment

Genome graphs can represent genetic variation and sequence uncertainty. Aligning sequences to genome graphs is key to many applications, including error correction, genome assembly, and genotyping of variants in a pan-genome graph. Yet, so far this step is often prohibitively slow. We present GraphAligner, a tool for aligning long reads to genome graphs. Compared to state-of-the-art tools, GraphAligner is 12x faster and uses 5x less memory, making it as efficient as aligning reads to linear reference genomes. When employing GraphAligner for error correction, we find it to be almost 3x more accurate and over 15x faster than extant tools. Availability Package manager https://anaconda.org/bioconda/graphaligner and source code: https://github.com/maickrau/GraphAligner