HMMER - profile hidden Markov model software

hmmalign

Align multiple sequences to a profile HMM.

hmmbuild

Build a profile HMM from a given multiple sequence alignment.

hmmcalibrate

Determine appropriate statistical significance parameters for a profile HMM prior to doing database searches.

hmmconvert

Convert HMMER profile HMMs to other formats, such as GCG profiles.

hmmemit

Generate sequences probabilistically from a profile HMM.

hmmpfam

Search a profile HMM database with a sequence (i.e., annotate various kinds of domains in the query sequence).

hmmsearch

Search a sequence database with a profile HMM (i.e., find additional homologues of a modeled family).

These programs use profile hidden Markov models (profile HMMs) to model the primary structure consensus of a family of protein or nucleic acid sequences.

All HMMER programs give a brief summary of their command-line syntax and options if invoked without any arguments. When invoked with the single argument, -h (i.e., help), a program will report more verbose command-line usage information, including rarely used, experimental, and expert options. -h will report version numbers which are useful if you need to report a bug or problem to me.

Each HMMER program has its own man page briefly summarizing command line usage. There is also a user's guide that came with the software distribution, which includes a tutorial introduction and more detailed descriptions of the programs.

See http://hmmer.wustl.edu/ for on-line documentation and the current HMMER release.

In general, no command line options should be needed by beginning users. The defaults are set up for optimum performance in most situations. Options that are single lowercase letters (e.g. -a ) are "common" options that are expected to be frequently used and will be important in many applications. Options that are single uppercase letters (e.g. -B ) are usually less common options, but also may be important in some applications. Options that are full words (e.g. --verbose ) are either rarely used, experimental, or expert options. Some experimental options are only there for my own ongoing experiments with HMMER, and may not be supported or documented adequately.

In general, HMMER attempts to read most common biological sequence file formats. It autodetects the format of the file. It also autodetects whether the sequences are protein or nucleic acid. Standard IUPAC degeneracy codes are allowed in addition to the usual 4-letter or 20-letter codes.

Unaligned sequences

Unaligned sequence files may be in FASTA, Swissprot, EMBL, GenBank, PIR, Intelligenetics, Strider, or GCG format. These formats are documented in the User's Guide.

Sequence alignments

Multiple sequence alignments may be in CLUSTALW, SELEX, or GCG MSF format. These formats are documented in the User's Guide.

For ease of using large stable sequence and HMM databases, HMMER looks for sequence files and HMM files in the current working directory as well as in system directories specified by environment variables.

BLASTDB

Specifies the directory location of sequence databases. Example: /seqlibs/blast-db/. In installations that use BLAST software, this environment variable is likely to already be set.

HMMERDB

Specifies the directory location of HMM databases. Example: /seqlibs/pfam/.

hmmalign hmmbuild hmmcalibrate hmmconvert hmmemit hmmfetch hmmindex hmmpfam hmmsearch

User guide and tutorial: Userguide.ps

WWW: http://hmmer.wustl.edu/

This software and documentation is Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Washington University School of Medicine. It is freely distributable under terms of the GNU General Public License. See COPYING in the source code distribution for more details, or contact me.

Sean Eddy
Dept. of Genetics
Washington Univ. School of Medicine
4566 Scott Ave.
St Louis, MO 63110 USA
Phone: 1-314-362-7666
FAX  : 1-314-362-7855
Email: eddy@genetics.wustl.edu