The functional potential of micro-organisms can be assessed by the whole genome shot gun sequencing. So far the techniques that have been developed lack the capacity of aligning a protein sequence against a DNA sequence. Thus, it becomes difficult to give the functional meaning to the protein sequence. Recently, Westbrook et. al.(2017) have developed a protein sequence aligner which is an improvement to the existing Burrows- Wheeler aligner that provides accurate alignment.
They have also compared the results of PALADIN with the current alignment methods and found that PALADIN works faster. The program has been written in C language and can be obtained from the following website https://github.com/twestbrookunh/paladin
Reference:
Anthony Westbrook et. al.(2017) PALADIN: protein alignment for functional profiling whole-metagenome shotgun data. Bioinformatics 33(10): 1473-1478.