Bowtie 2

Bowtie 2 is a fast, memory-efficient genomic read aligner used to map sequencing reads against long reference sequences such as mammalian genomes. It is especially effective for reads ranging from around 50 bases to hundreds or thousands of characters, and it supports modern sequencing workflows that require gapped, local, and paired-end alignment. The tool builds compact FM-index-based reference indexes, keeping memory usage low even for large genomes like the human genome. Bowtie 2 outputs alignments in SAM format and includes companion utilities for building and inspecting indexes. It is widely used in bioinformatics pipelines for RNA-seq, DNA-seq, metagenomics, variant analysis, and other sequencing-based research tasks. Overall, Bowtie 2 remains a foundational command-line tool for high-throughput sequence alignment and reproducible computational biology workflows.