Pyrodigal: Python bindings and interface to Prodigal, an efficient method for gene prediction in prokaryotes

Larralde M, Journal of Open Source Software (2022).

Abstract

Improvements in sequencing technologies have seen the amount of available genomic data expand considerably over the last twenty years. One of the key steps for analysing is the prediction of protein-coding regions in genomic sequences, known as Open Reading Frames (ORFs), which span between a start and a stop codon. A recent comparison of several ORF prediction methods (Korandla et al., 2019) has shown that Prodigal (Hyatt et al., 2010), a prokaryotic gene finder that uses dynamic programming, is one of the highest performing ab initio ORF finders. Pyrodigal is a Python package that provides bindings and an interface to Prodigal to make it easier to use in Python applications.