ITSx updated with new features

Over the weekend, I’ve been able to finish off some stuff that has been stuck on my todo-list. Among these was to finish up the pieces of the ITSx update we put in the hands of our users today. This update brings three requested features, and a fix for an extremely rarely occurring bug:

1. If the “–not_found T” option is used, ITSx now outputs both a list and a FASTA file of entries in the input file that did not have any ITS regions detected in them. This was a user requested feature, and a very nice an easily implemented one.
2. As mentioned in a previous blog post, ITSx has up until now not been able to preserve the sequence headers of the input file. In hindsight, such an option would have been obvious to include, and as of version 1.0.4 ITSx comes with a “‘–preserve” option that allows headers to be carried over to all the output files.
3. ITSx is now better at handling certain chimeric sequences.

In addition, there was a minor bug that very rarely (I have only seen one such example) that could cause the ITS region to be reported with negative lengths. This issue has now been fixed.

This update brings ITSx to version 1.0.4, and it can be downloaded here.