BLASR (Basic Local Alignment with Successive Refinement) for mapping Single Molecule Sequencing (SMS) reads that are thousands to tens of thousands of bases long with divergence between the read and genome dominated by insertion and deletion error.
Here is how I use the blasr to align PacBio reads to the contigs (target.fasta). The “target.fasta.sa” is the suffix array from “target.fasta” generated by sawriter.
blasr query.fa ./target.fasta -sa ./target.fasta.sa -bestn 40 -maxScore -500 -m 4 -nproc 24 -out target.m4 -maxLCPLength 15
the output format option “-m 4″ generate the alignment coordinate. Not fully documented, but I can explain that to you.
I use a 24 cores / 48G ram server for the alignment. It took about 2 to 3 hours aligning 3G PacBio Reads to 10^6 sequences of short read contigs with a mean 3.5kbp length.
