esl-alipid
Quick Start
- Command:
esl-alipid [options] <alignment_file> - Local executable:
/home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/esl-alipid - Full reference: See references/help.md for complete options and usage
When To Use This Tool
- Use
esl-alipidwhen you need pairwise percent-identity measurements across all sequence pairs in an alignment. - It is useful for diagnosing redundancy, alignment diversity, and whether an MSA should be clustered, filtered, or split before downstream modeling.
- Use it on aligned sequence files, not raw unaligned FASTA collections.
- In this environment the binary is currently blocked by the missing
libopenblas.so.0, so treat the syntax below as documented behavior pending library repair.
Common Patterns
# Compute pairwise percent identities for an alignment
esl-alipid alignment.sto
# Suppress the header in machine-oriented output
esl-alipid --noheader alignment.sto
# Force alphabet interpretation if guessing is ambiguous
esl-alipid --amino alignment.sto
esl-alipid --dna alignment.sto
Recommended Workflow
- Prepare a multiple sequence alignment file (FASTA or Stockholm format)
- Run
esl-alipid <alignment_file>to compute pairwise PIDs - Review output to assess sequence diversity or redundancy
- Use results to guide filtering, clustering, or downstream analysis decisions
Guardrails
- Ensure input file is a valid multiple sequence alignment (not unaligned sequences)
- Verify library dependencies are available (requires libopenblas)
- Check that all sequences in the alignment use the same alphabet
- If automatic alphabet detection fails, force the correct alphabet with
--amino,--dna, or--rna