SonicParanoid: fast, accurate and easy orthology inference

MOTIVATION: Orthology inference constitutes a common base of many genome-based studies, as a pre-requisite for annotating new genomes, finding target genes for biotechnological applications and revealing the evolutionary history of life. Although its importance keeps rising with the ever-growing number of sequenced genomes, existing tools are computationally demanding and difficult to employ. RESULTS: Here, we present SonicParanoid, which is faster than, but comparably accurate to, the well-established tools with a balanced precision-recall trade-off. Furthermore, SonicParanoid substantially relieves the difficulties of orthology inference for those who need to construct and maintain their own genomic datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: SonicParanoid is available with a GNU GPLv3 license on the Python Package Index and BitBucket. Documentation is available at http://iwasakilab.bs.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sonicparanoid. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.