An introduction to the Lagan alignment toolkit.

The Lagan Toolkit is a software package for comparison of genomic sequences. It includes the CHAOS local alignment program, LAGAN global alignment program for two, or more sequences and Shuffle-LAGAN, a "glocal" alignment method that handles genomic rearrangements in a global alignment framework. The alignment programs included in the Lagan Toolkit have been widely used to compare genomes of many organisms, from bacteria to large mammalian genomes. This chapter provides an overview of the algorithms used by the LAGAN programs to construct genomic alignments, explains how to build alignments using either the standalone program or the web server, and discusses some of the common pitfalls users encounter when using the toolkit.