Diamond is a new high-throughput program for aligning DNA reads or protein sequences against a protein reference database such as NR, at up to 20,000 times the speed of BLAST, with high sensitivity.

• Latest Version: 0.9.9
• Added: November, 2016
• Updated: July, 2017
• Link: http://ab.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/software/diamond/

See which versions of diamond are available:

$ module avail diamond

Load the diamond environment module and run it:

$ module load diamond/0.9.9
$ diamond

Notes from the sysadmin during installation:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget https://github.com/bbuchfink/diamond/releases/download/v0.9.9/diamond-linux64.tar.gz
$ tar xf diamond-linux64.tar.gz
$ sudo cp diamond diamond_manual.pdf /export/apps/diamond/0.9.9

Diamond requires specially formatted databases, which you create using the diamond makedb subcommand. The input must be a FASTA file, but can be gzip compressed, for example the NR database from NCBI:

$ wget ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/db/FASTA/nr.gz
$ diamond makedb --in nr.gz -d nr
$ sudo mkdir -p /export/data/bio/diamond
$ sudo cp nr.dmnd /export/data/bio/diamond