AnchoRNA: Full virus genome alignments through conserved anchor regions

AnchoRNA identifies 55 conserved anchor regions in a dataset of 55 representative Pestivirus genomes, enabling anchor-guided full-genome alignments that improve accuracy and efficiency.

• Why it matters: Full viral genome alignment is hard because long sequences, large indels, divergence, and RNA-structure-based complexity can break standard methods, especially for selected subsequences and phylogenetic analyses.
• What they did: The Python command-line tool finds conserved anchors within translated coding sequences by default, then partitions genomes using these anchors and evaluates anchor-guided alignments with multiple alignment programs.
• The result: Compared with three other anchor-finding tools, incorporating AnchoRNA’s anchors improved alignment quality across tested alignment tools, supporting its effectiveness for aligning complete viral genomes.

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