mash

fast genome and metagenome distance estimation using MinHash

Mash uses MinHash locality-sensitive hashing to reduce large biosequences to a representative sketch and rapidly estimate pairwise distances between genomes or metagenomes. Mash sketch databases effectively delineate known species boundaries, allow construction of approximate phylogenies, and can be searched in seconds using assembled genomes or raw sequencing runs from Illumina, Pacific Biosciences, and Oxford Nanopore. For metagenomics, Mash scales to thousands of samples and can replicate Human Microbiome Project and Global Ocean Survey results in a fraction of the time.