Abstract

Bowtie is an ultrafast, memory-efficient alignment program for aligning short DNA sequence reads to large genomes. For the human genome, Burrows-Wheeler indexing allows Bowtie to align more than 25 million reads per CPU hour with a memory footprint of approximately 1.3 gigabytes. Bowtie extends previous Burrows-Wheeler techniques with a novel quality-aware backtracking algorithm that permits mismatches. Multiple processor cores can be used simultaneously to achieve even greater alignment speeds. Bowtie is open source (http://bowtie.cbcb.umd.edu).