ShuffleAnalyzer: A Comprehensive Tool to Visualize DNA Shuffling

DNA shuffling is a powerful technique for generating synthetic DNA via recombination of homologous parental sequences. Resulting chimeras are often incorporated into complex libraries for functionality screenings that identify novel variants with improved characteristics. To survey shuffling efficiency, subsequences of chimeras can be computationally assigned to their corresponding parental counterpart, yielding insight into frequency of recombination events, diversity of shuffling libraries and actual composition of final variants. Whereas tools for parental assignment exist, they do not provide direct visualization of the results, making the analysis time-consuming and cumbersome. Here we present ShuffleAnalyzer, a comprehensive, user-friendly, Python-based analysis tool that directly generates graphical outputs of parental assignments and is freely available under a BSD-3 license (https://github.com/joerg-swg/ShuffleAnalyzer/releases). Besides DNA shuffling, peptide insertions can be simultaneously analyzed and visualized, which makes ShuffleAnalyzer a highly valuable tool for integrated approaches often used in synthetic biology, such as AAV capsid engineering in gene therapy applications.