Fast and memory efficient partial order alignment with minipoa

Partial order alignment (POA) has emerged as a fundamental component in long-read error correction, assembly and pangenomics. However, conventional POA algorithms are limited by high time and memory requirements, making them inefficient for large-scale data sets. Here, we present minipoa, a fast and memory-efficient POA tool that incorporates seed-chain-align heuristics, adaptive or static banding strategies, and single-instruction multiple-data optimizations. Minipoa achieves up to a fivefold speedup over abPOA, reduces memory usage by up to 16-fold, and improves correction accuracy, while maintaining strong performance on both Pacific Biosciences and Oxford Nanopore Technologies simulated data sets, and can be readily integrated into existing long-read error correction and assembly workflows. In multiple sequence alignment data sets, minipoa demonstrates highly competitive computational efficiency and alignment accuracy, achieving total column scores up to 2.5-fold higher compared with MAFFT in low-similarity scenarios. Moreover, minipoa enables multiple sequence alignment of megabase-long genomes and million-sequence data sets, demonstrated by 342 Mycobacterium tuberculosis sequences and 1 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences, respectively. Collectively, minipoa is well positioned to become a cornerstone in the era of large-scale pangenomics.