The mauveAligner and progressiveMauve alignment algorithms have been implemented as command-line programs included with the downloadable Mauve software. When run from the command-line, these programs provide options not yet available in the graphical interface.

Mauve is a system for efficiently constructing multiple genome alignments in the presence of large-scale evolutionary events such as rearrangement and inversion. Multiple genome alignment provides a basis for research into comparative genomics and the study of evolutionary dynamics. Aligning whole genomes is a fundamentally different problem than aligning short sequences.

Mauve has been developed with the idea that a multiple genome aligner should require only modest computational resources. It employs algorithmic techniques that scale well in the amount of sequence being aligned. For example, a pair of Y. pestis genomes can be aligned in under a minute, while a group of 9 divergent Enterobacterial genomes can be aligned in a few hours.

Mauve computes and interactively visualizes genome sequence comparisons. Using FastA or GenBank sequence data, Mauve constructs multiple genome alignments that identify large-scale rearrangement, gene gain, gene loss, indels, and nucleotide substutition.

Mauve is developed at the University of Wisconsin.