Sequence alignment is a commonly used tool in bioinformatics for different applications. In order to increase the performance of these tools (e.g. BLAST and the different versions of it) in terms of execution time, the Software Development Group at Genetwister created a BLAST based implementation which can run in a Spark cluster using HDFS as file system support.

Genomic Selection
Genomic selection (GS) is an alternative to marker-assisted selection, which can accelerate the genetic gain through shorter breeding cycles. Genetwister is implementing new breeding schemes and methods that integrate GS for crop improvement.