LAST finds similar regions between sequences, and aligns them. It is designed for comparing large datasets to each other (e.g. vertebrate genomes and/or large numbers of DNA reads). It can:
To handle mammalian genomes, it's best if you have at least 10-20 gigabytes of real memory, but you can get by with 2 gigabytes.
To install the software, you need a C++ compiler. On Linux, you might need to install a package called "g++". On Mac, you might need to install command-line developer tools. On Windows, you might need to install Cygwin.
Using the command line, go into the top-level LAST directory. To compile the programs, type:
make
Optionally, copy the programs and scripts to a standard "bin" directory (using "sudo" to request administrator permissions):
sudo make install
Or copy them to your personal bin directory:
make install prefix=~
You might have to log out and back in before your computer recognizes the new programs.
Please see the other files in the doc directory, especially last-tutorial.html.
If you would like to understand LAST in detail, please look at these articles. If you use LAST in your research, please cite one (or more) of them.
The main algorithms used by LAST:
Adaptive seeds tame genomic sequence comparison. SM Kielbasa, R Wan, K Sato, P Horton, MC Frith: Genome Research 2011 21:487.
How LAST uses sequence quality data:
Incorporating sequence quality data into alignment improves DNA read mapping. MC Frith, R Wan, P Horton: Nucleic Acids Research 2010 38(7):e100.
Choice of score parameters, ambiguity of alignment columns, and gamma-centroid alignment:
Parameters for Accurate Genome Alignment. MC Frith, M Hamada, P Horton: BMC Bioinformatics 2010 11:80.
LAST includes public domain code from Yi-Kuo Yu and Stephen Altschul (NCBI), to infer probabilities from a score matrix. This is used for incorporating sequence quality data, and estimating column ambiguity. Reference:
Yu Y-K, Altschul SF: The construction of amino acid substitution matrices for the comparison of proteins with non-standard compositions. Bioinformatics 21(2005), 902-911.
LAST includes public domain code from the Spouge group (NCBI), which forms the basis of lastex. Reference:
S Sheetlin, Y Park, JL Spouge "The Gumbel pre-factor k for gapped local alignment can be estimated from simulations of global alignment" (2005) Nucl Acids Res 33: 4987-4994.
LAST (including the scripts) is distributed under the GNU General Public License, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
LAST's website is: http://last.cbrc.jp/
Questions and feedback are very welcome. Please use the public mailing list:
last-align (ATmark) googlegroups (dot) com
Please let us know about any problems, rather than giving up in disgust. Feedback is essential for scientific software like this: we cannot solve problems that we are unaware of, and we cannot make it useful and convenient without learning how various people actually (try to) use it. It is also valuable to hear success stories, so we know what we are doing right. Unlike some other software projects, we will never send rude or mocking replies.
Having said that, we cannot promise to always help. If you find an error, please tell us the exact error message, the exact commands that trigger it, and any other potentially-relevant information (e.g. your operating system).
If you do a benchmarking test of LAST, we recommend you contact us to check you are using it in a suitable way. The history of bioinformatics benchmarks shows it is all too easy to get this wrong.