Fast, flexible gene cluster family delineation with IGUA.

IGUA is a scalable and flexible gene cluster family delineation method that is 29 times faster than the current state-of-the-art, without losing accuracy.

• Why it matters: Efficiently identifying homologous gene clusters in large genomic datasets is crucial for advancing microbial genomics and natural product discovery, but existing tools lack scalability and flexibility.
• What they did: The authors developed IGUA, which clusters over 2.8 million biosynthetic gene clusters from nearly 1 million prokaryotic genomes into 56,960 GCFs in less than 18 hours, and also applied it to five other gene cluster types.
• The result: IGUA's high efficiency and versatility enable large-scale (meta)genomic mining, supporting comprehensive analysis of diverse gene clusters at unprecedented scales.