Spines is a collection of software tools, developed and used by the Vertebrate Genome Biology Group at the Broad Institute. It provides basic data structures for efficient data manipulation (mostly genomic sequences, alignments, variation etc.), as well as specialized tool sets for various analyses. It also features three sequence alignment packages: Satsuma, a highly parallelized program for high-sensitivity, genome-wide synteny; Papaya, an all-purpose alignment tool for less diverged sequences; and SLAP, a context-sensitive local aligner for diverged sequences with large gaps.

Access Spines here.