MUMmer


MUMmer is a bioinformatics software system for sequence alignment. It is based on the suffix tree data structure and is one of the fastest and most efficient systems available for this task, enabling it to be applied to very long sequences. It has been widely used for comparing different genomes to one another. In recent years it has become a popular algorithm for comparing genome assemblies to one another, which allows scientists to determine how a genome has changed after adding more DNA sequence or after running a different genome assembly program. The acronym "MUMmer" comes from "Maximal Unique Matches", or MUMs. The original algorithms in the MUMMER software package were designed by Art Delcher, Simon Kasif and Steven Salzberg. Mummer was the first whole genome comparison system developed in Bioinformatics. It was originally applied to comparison of two related strains of bacteria.
The MUMmer software is open source and can be found at the MUMmer home page. The home page also has links to technical papers describing the system. The system is maintained primarily by Steven Salzberg and Arthur Delcher at Center for Computational Biology at Johns Hopkins University.
MUMmer is a highly cited bioinformatics system in the scientific literature. According to Google Scholar, as of early 2013 the original MUMmer paper has been cited 691 times; the MUMmer 2 paper has been cited 455 times; and the MUMmer 3.0 article has been cited 903 times.