List of NGS aligners
The folks at EBI have produced a summary of all the high throughput sequence aligners commonly used (link), and there is a companion paper in the current issue of Bioinformatics. The timeline is a fascinating info-graphic.
There is also a table describing the features of each. One thing I noticed is that there are relatively few aligners for RNA data, despite RNA-seq being arguably the most important application in NGS right now. (I will cover the use of RNA specific aligners in future posts.) The paper discusses some of the generalities of selecting an appropriate alignment tool for the job but doesn't go so far as to suggest which one is "best".
There is also a table describing the features of each. One thing I noticed is that there are relatively few aligners for RNA data, despite RNA-seq being arguably the most important application in NGS right now. (I will cover the use of RNA specific aligners in future posts.) The paper discusses some of the generalities of selecting an appropriate alignment tool for the job but doesn't go so far as to suggest which one is "best".