What is jMOTU?

jMOTU

jMOTU is a super handy tool that makes it easy to cluster barcode DNA sequence data into molecular operational taxonomic units (MOTU). Not sure what a MOTU is? No worries! You can check out the DNA Barcoding pages on our website for more info.

What Can jMOTU Do?

• It reads input sequences in FASTA or NEXUS format.


• Calculates distances between pairs of sequences using a mix of BLAST and the Needleman-Wunch exact global alignment algorithm.


• Clusters input sequences into MOTUs using different cutoff measures.

Processing Large Datasets

jMOTU can handle big datasets like a champ! It uses various filtering steps to reduce the number of exact global alignments it needs to perform. When figuring out pairwise distances, it ignores gaps and only counts nucleotide mismatches. This makes it pretty tough against sequencing errors that might come from homopolymer runs!

The Clustering Process

The clustering happens with a greedy algorithm that doesn’t care about the order of your input sequences. In fact, jMOTU has been tested on raw datasets with about 50,000 input sequences! And if you have even larger datasets? No problem! It can cluster them too by first pre-clustering smaller subsets before combining everything for a thorough analysis.

Download jMOTU

If you’re ready to dive in and start clustering your DNA sequence data, don’t hesitate to get your hands on jMOTU!

How Download Works

Go to the Softpas website, press the 'Downloads' button, and pick the app you want to download and install—easy and fast!