Satsuma is a whole-genome synteny alignment program. It takes two genomes, computes alignments, and then keeps only the parts that are orthologous, i.e. following the conserved order and orientation of features, such as protein coding genes, non-coding genes, or neutral sequences. Satsuma does not require any pre-processing, such as repeat masking, since it will automatically detect ambiguous mappings.
Satsuma has parallelization built-in and is designed to run on multi-core architectures. The run-time for aligning two bird-size genomes (~1.2 Gb) is around two days on 24 CPUs.
You can find the manual here.
Download the latest source code from here.
Stable versions can also be downloaded from the Broad Institute's web site.
An incomplete list of questions and answers (yes, these have really been asked by our users! Please feel free to add your own by e-mailing us) is here.
If you use Satsuma in your research, please cite:
Grabherr, M. G., Russell, P., Meyer, M., Mauceli, E., Alföldi, J., Di Palma, F., & Lindblad-Toh, K. (2010). Genome-wide synteny through highly sensitive sequence alignment: Satsuma. Bioinformatics, 26(9), 1145-51.
Tutorial at http://evomics.org/learning/genomics/satsuma/
