microsatellites_finder 1.2.1

This program searches for microsatellites in fasta sequences. The available options are the following:

• -i, --input-fasta: path of the fasta file containing the sequence(s) to analyze. The file can be either a plain text file or a gzip compressed file.

• -o, --output-file: path of the file to save with the results of the analysis. The coordinates of the microsatellites will be 0-based.

• -l, --seed-length: length of the seed of the microsatellites, i.e. the number of nucleotides that will be repeated. For instance -l 2 will find microsatellites like ACACACAC where the seed AC is repeated 4 times.

• -r, --minimum_repetitions: minimum number of repetitions of the seed. For instance -r 3 will find microsatellites like CTACTACTA or CTACTACTACTA where the seed CTA is repeated at least 3 times. The minimum allowed value is 2 and the default value is 3.

• -im, --imperfect: include imperfect microsatellites. With this option microsatellites repeated at least -r -1 times that share the same seed and have a distance up to the “–imperfect” value will be merged together and will be considered as a single microsatellite. By default this option is disabled and microsatellites are kept separated.

• -s, --strict: when --imperfect is a positive integer, this option allows to search for imperfect microsatellites only by using nucleotides that are present in the seed. For instance, if the seed is AT only the nucleotides A and T will be considered. By default this option is disabled and all the nucleotides ACGT are considered.

• -a, --alphabet: alphabet to use for the microsatellites search. The alphabet can be either dna for DNA or aa for PROTEINS. Default is “dna”.

• -f, --flanking: length of the sequences flanking the microsatellites. The sequences will be written in the output file. Sequences that overstep the boundaries of a chromosome will be truncated. By default this option is disabled.

• -c, --cores: number of CPUs to use in the computation. By default it will use all the available CPUs.

• -p, --progress: track the progress of the computation with a progress bar.