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Tooling Survey 2026

This page records the default tool choices referenced by the agents and bioinformatics skills. It is a practical baseline, not a claim that every workflow should use the same tool. Agents should still choose methods from the biological question, input data, available hardware, and the literature for the inferred organism or virus group.

Step CPU baseline GPU or accelerated option
Long-read QC Dorado summaries/trimming, Chopper, Filtlong, Pychopper for full-length cDNA; Porechop_ABI only as a documented fallback None documented
Short-read mapping bwa-mem2, BBMap NVIDIA Parabricks fq2bam
Long-read mapping minimap2 v2.30 mm2-fast, mm2-gb, mm2-ax when the hardware fits
Assembly SPAdes 4, Flye 2.9 for long-read isolate drafts, Autocycler 0.6+ for bacterial isolate consensus, Flye --meta / metaFlye for long-read metagenomes, metaMDBG 1.1, myloasm where appropriate None documented
Domain taxonomy triage BBTools QuickClade via bryce911/bbtools, followed by GTDB-Tk, EukCC, vConTACT3, or GVClass by domain None documented
Binning QuickBin via bryce911/bbtools SemiBin2 with CUDA-backed PyTorch
Bin QC CheckM2, EukCC, GUNC None documented
Gene calling pyrodigal, pyrodigal-gv, BRAKER3 None documented
ncRNA screening tRNAscan-SE, Infernal cmsearch against Rfam covariance models None documented
Annotation DIAMOND, eggNOG-mapper, InterProScan, pyhmmer, TaxonKit MMseqs2-GPU
Phylogenomics VeryFastTree, IQ-TREE, MAFFT, trimAl, ete4 None documented
Orthology and pangenomes OrthoFinder, ProteinOrtho, MMseqs2 MMseqs2-GPU
Synteny MCScanX, ntSynt, SibeliaZ None documented
Viromics geNomad, CheckV, VirSorter2, vConTACT3, GVClass None documented
Structure annotation TM-Vec, Boltz-2, ColabFold, ESMFold, Foldseek Boltz-2, Foldseek GPU, ColabFold, ESMFold
Statistics and ML LinkML schemas, Pydantic validation/parsing, DuckDB, scikit-learn, XGBoost XGBoost CUDA, RAPIDS cuML

Maintenance Notes

  • Pin container tags or database versions in run records when they affect interpretation.
  • Record database names and dates for taxonomy, annotation, and literature searches.
  • Treat GPU paths as alternatives, not automatic upgrades. They need matching hardware and the same scientific validation as CPU paths.
  • If a newer tool becomes the default in a skill, update the skill, this page, and any routing benchmark that depends on the workflow.