SOAPaligner/soap2 is a member of the SOAP (Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package). It is an updated version of SOAP software for short oligonucleotide alignment. The new program features in super fast and accurate alignment for huge amounts of short reads generated by Illumina/Solexa Genome Analyzer. Compared to soap v1, it is one order of magnitude faster. It require only 2 minutes aligning one million single-end reads onto the human reference genome. Another remarkable improvement of SOAPaligner is that it now supports a wide range of the read length.
SOAPaligner benefitted in time and space efficiency by a revolution in the basic data structures and algorithms used.The core algorithms and the indexing data structures (2way-BWT) are developed by the algorithms research group of the Department of Computer Science, the University of Hong Kong (T.W. Lam, Alan Tam, Simon Wong, Edward Wu and S.M. Yiu).
