Welcome to MacSyFinder’s documentation!

MacSyFinder is a program to model and detect macromolecular systems, genetic pathways… in protein datasets. In prokaryotes, these systems have often evolutionarily conserved properties: they are made of conserved components, and are encoded in compact loci (conserved genetic architecture). The user models these systems with MacSyFinder to reflect these conserved features, and to allow their efficient detection.

Criteria for systems detection include component content (quorum), and genomic co-localization. Each component corresponds to a hidden Markov model (HMM) protein profile to perform homology searches with the program Hmmer.

In order to model macromolecular systems, the user:
  • builds or gather from databanks HMM protein profiles for components of interest,
  • defines decision rules for each system in a dedicated XML grammar (see Macromolecular systems definition).
_images/figure_main-2.svg

Note

If you use MacSyFinder, please cite:

Abby SS, Néron B, Ménager H, Touchon M, Rocha EPC (2014). MacSyFinder: A Program to Mine Genomes for Molecular Systems with an Application to CRISPR-Cas Systems. PLoS ONE 9(10): e110726. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110726

Indices and tables