Development and Exploration of Velvetrope: a fast, bitwise local alignment algorithm on sequences

In this poster we develop and explore Velvetrope; a fast, bitwise local alignment method for comparing large numbers of genetic sequences in a pairwise fashion. This algorithm allows for quick analysis of metagenomic sets, elucidating conserved subsections of a sequence across sets of sequences. It does not perform a traditional alignment, but rather quickly finds all highly conserved regions between sequences. We will explore how the algorithm works and how it compares to standard methods like BLAST and HMMer. We will show its benefits, differences and weaknesses compared to these widely used methods and how Velvetrope can be used to extract otherwise inaccessible data from large sequence databases.