About BIRCH

Version: D
Date: Sun Jun 28 17:12:47 GMT-05:00 2026

What is BIRCH?

BIRCH is a powerful framework for organizing and using bioinformatics. BIRCH comes with hundreds of commonly-used tools, and allows you to customize your BIRCH site by adding new ones.

Go to main BIRCH site at Univ. of Manitoba

BIRCH: A user-oriented, locally-customizable, bioinformatics system
Brian Fristensky
BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8:54 (9 February 2007)
[Abstract] [ PDF]

What is BioLegato?

BioLegato is the graphical user interface that runs programs in BIRCH.

BioLegato can work with many different kinds of data, including sequences, alignments, phylogenetic trees, molecular markers, and NGS sequencing reads.

BioLegato makes it easy to point and click through complex analytical pipelines, such as genome or transcriptome assembly.

Examples of BioLegato applications. From top to bottom: blnfetch - BLAST results, retrieves hits from NCBI; blpalign - analysis of multple protein alignmens; blncbi - build queries to find sequences at NCBI; blreads - preprocessing and quality control of NGS reads; genome and transcriptome assembly.

Alvare, G., Roche-Lima, A. & Fristensky, B. BioLegato: a programmable, object-oriented graphic user interface. BMC Bioinformatics 24, 316 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-023-05436-4

Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy: AI-generated code is not used in BIRCH. It is our policy NOT to generate code using AI. To the best of our knowledge, none of the 3rd party programs included in BIRCH was produced using AI. However, we cannot guarantee that future applications packaged with BIRCH were not generated using AI. Wherever possible, only AI-free code from 3rd parties will be included in BIRCH. In the event that we decide to include 3rd party programs generated by AI, we will clearly identify those programs in the documentation as AI-generated.