: MGEScan-long terminal repeat (LTR) and MGEScan-non-LTR are successfully used programs for identifying LTRs and non-LTR retrotransposons in eukaryotic genome sequences. However, these programs are not supported by easy-to-use interfaces nor well suited for data visualization in general data formats. Here, we present MGEScan, a user-friendly system that combines these two programs with a Galaxy workflow system accelerated with MPI and Python threading on compute clusters. MGEScan and Galaxy empower researchers to identify transposable elements in a graphical user interface with ready-to-use workflows. MGEScan also visualizes the custom annotation tracks for mobile genetic elements in public genome browsers. A maximum speed-up of 3.26× is attained for execution time using concurrent processing and MPI on four virtual cores. MGEScan provides four operational modes: as a command line tool, as a Galaxy Toolshed, on a Galaxy-based web server, and on a virtual cluster on the Amazon cloud.
Availability and implementation: MGEScan tutorials and source code are available at http://mgescan.readthedocs.org/
Contact: hatang@indiana.edu or syoh@ajou.ac.kr
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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