The Burrows Wheeler Aligner (BWA)

The Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) is a widely used software tool for aligning genomic sequence reads to a reference genome. BWA was developed by Heng Li in 2009 and is named after the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), a data compression algorithm that plays a crucial role in its underlying algorithms. BWA is an important tool for next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis, as it enables researchers to map and analyze the huge amounts of data generated by NGS platforms.