(C) Johannes Soeding, Markus Meier, Martin Steinegger, Milot Mirdita, Michael Remmert, Andreas Hauser, Andreas Biegert

The HH-suite is an open-source software package for sensitive protein sequence searching based on the pairwise alignment of hidden Markov models (HMMs).

We provide an extensive user guide with many usage examples, frequently asked questions and guides to build your own databases.

We recommend compiling HH-suite on the machine that should run the computations so that it can be optimized for the available CPU instruction sets.

To compile from source, you will need a recent C/C++ compiler (at least GCC 4.8 or Clang 3.6) and CMake 2.8.12 or later.

To download the source code and compile the HH-suite execute the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/soedinglab/hh-suite.git
mkdir -p hh-suite/build && cd hh-suite/build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=. ..
make -j 4 && make install
export PATH="$(pwd)/bin:$(pwd)/scripts:$PATH"

❗ To compile HH-suite3 on macOS, first install the gcc compiler from Homebrew. The default macOS clang compiler does not support OpenMP and HH-suite3 will only be able to use a single thread. Then replace the cmake call above with the following one:

CC="$(brew --prefix)/bin/gcc-8" CXX="$(brew --prefix)/bin/g++-8" cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=. ..

HH-suite3 can also be installed by downloading a statically compiled version, conda or Docker. HH-suite3 requires a 64-bit system (check with uname -a | grep x86_64) with at least the SSE2 instruction set (check by executing cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep sse2 on Linux or sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu.features | grep SSE2 on macOS).

# install via conda
conda install -c conda-forge -c bioconda hhsuite 
# install docker
docker pull soedinglab/hh-suite
# static SSE2 build
wget https://github.com/soedinglab/hh-suite/releases/download/v3.2.0/hhsuite-3.2.0-SSE2-Linux.tar.gz; tar xvfz hhsuite-3.2.0-SSE2-Linux.tar.gz; export PATH="$(pwd)/bin:$(pwd)/scripts:$PATH"
# static AVX2 build
wget https://github.com/soedinglab/hh-suite/releases/download/v3.2.0/hhsuite-3.2.0-AVX2-Linux.tar.gz; tar xvfz hhsuite-3.2.0-AVX2-Linux.tar.gz; export PATH="$(pwd)/bin:$(pwd)/scripts:$PATH"

❗ Only the self-compiled HH-suite3 version includes MPI support, since MPI configuration is specific to the local environment.

Download current databases from our download server. To build up multiple sequences alignments using HHblits, the Uniclust30 database is sufficient. A large collection of HMMs build from enviromental sequences can be downloaded here.

For performing a single search iteration of HHblits, run HHblits with the following command:

hhblits -i <input-file> -o <result-file> -n 1 -d <database-basename>

For generating an alignment of homologous sequences:

hhblits -i <input-file> -o <result-file> -oa3m <result-alignment> -d <database-basename>

A detailed list of options for HHblits is available by running HHblits with the -h parameter.

Steinegger M, Meier M, Mirdita M, Vöhringer H, Haunsberger S J, and Söding J (2019) HH-suite3 for fast remote homology detection and deep protein annotation, BMC Bioinformatics, 473. doi: 10.1186/s12859-019-3019-7

• Soeding lab
• Databases for the HH-suite