Nextflow is a reactive workflow framework and a programming DSL that eases writing computational pipelines with complex data.

It is designed around the idea that the Linux platform is the lingua franca of data science. Linux provides many simple but powerful command-line and scripting tools that, when chained together, facilitate complex data manipulations.

Nextflow extends this approach, adding the ability to define complex program interactions and a high-level parallel computational environment based on the dataflow programming model.

A Nextflow script is defined by composing many different processes. Each process can be written in any scripting language that can be executed by the Linux platform (BASH, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc), to which is added the ability to coordinate and synchronize the processes execution by simply specifying their inputs and outputs.

The Snakemake workflow management system is a tool to create reproducible and scalable data analyses. Workflows are described via a human readable, Python based language. They can be seamlessly scaled to server, cluster, grid and cloud environments, without the need to modify the workflow definition. Finally, Snakemake workflows can entail a description of required software, which will be automatically deployed to any execution environment.

Seqtk is a fast and lightweight tool for processing sequences in the FASTA or FASTQ format. It seamlessly parses both FASTA and FASTQ files which can also be optionally compressed by gzip.

VSEARCH is an alternative to the USEARCH tool developed by Robert C. Edgar (2010).

VSEARCH supports de novo and reference based chimera detection, clustering, full-length and prefix dereplication, rereplication, reverse complementation, masking, all-vs-all pairwise global alignment, exact and global alignment searching, shuffling, subsampling and sorting. It also supports FASTQ file analysis, filtering, conversion and merging of paired-end reads.

samblaster is a fast and flexible program for marking duplicates in read-id grouped1 paired-end SAM files. It can also optionally output discordant read pairs and/or split read mappings to separate SAM files, and/or unmapped/clipped reads to a separate FASTQ file.

The UCSC tool suite contains utilities designed to work with UCSC Genome Browser data and databases.

Sambamba is a high performance highly parallel robust and fast tool (and library), written in the D programming language, for working with SAM and BAM files. Because of its efficiency is an important work horse running in many sequencing centres around the world today.