A Long Fragment Aligner called ALFALFA

BACKGROUND: Rapid evolutions in sequencing technology force read mappers into flexible adaptation to longer reads, changing error models, memory barriers and novel applications. RESULTS: ALFALFA achieves a high performance in accurately mapping long single-end and paired-end reads to gigabase-scale reference genomes, while remaining competitive for mapping shorter reads. Its seed-and-extend workflow is underpinned by fast retrieval of super-maximal exact matches from an enhanced sparse suffix array, with flexible parameter tuning to balance performance, memory footprint and accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: ALFALFA is open source and available at http://alfalfa.ugent.be. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-015-0533-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.