PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Anthony Westbrook AU - Jordan Ramsdell AU - Taruna Aggarwal AU - Louisa Normington AU - R. Daniel Bergeron AU - W. Kelley Thomas AU - Matthew MacManes TI - PALADIN:Protein Alignment for Functional Profiling Whole Metagenome Shotgun Data AID - 10.1101/047712 DP - 2016 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 047712 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/07/047712.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/07/047712.full AB - Whole metagenome shotgun sequencing is a powerful approach for assaying the functional potential of microbial communities. Presently, we lack tools that efficiently and accurately align DNA reads against protein references, the technique necessary for constructing a functional profile. Here, we present PALADIN—a novel modification of Burrows-Wheeler Aligner that provides more accurate alignment and orders-of-magnitude improved efficiency by directly mapping in protein space.