wgatools: an ultrafast toolkit for manipulating whole genome alignments

Abstract

Summary: With the rapid development of long-read sequencing technologies, the era of individual complete genomes is approaching. We have developed wgatools, a cross-platform, ultrafast toolkit that supports a range of whole genome alignment (WGA) formats, offering practical tools for conversion, processing, statistical evaluation, and visualization of alignments, thereby facilitating population-level genome analysis and advancing functional and evolutionary genomics. Availability and Implementation: wgatools supports diverse formats and can process, filter, and statistically evaluate alignments, perform alignment-based variant calling, and visualize alignments both locally and genome-wide. Built with Rust for efficiency and safe memory usage, it ensures fast performance and can handle large datasets consisting of hundreds of genomes. wgatools is published as free software under the MIT open-source license, and its source code is freely available at https://github.com/wjwei-handsome/wgatools. Contact: weiwenjie@westlake.edu.cn (W.W.) or liuhaijun@yzwlab.cn (H.-J.L.).