Sifter identifies and extracts polymorphic sites in a set of unaligned DNA sequences. DNA differences are defined as sites that vary from a reference sequence.
The default reference is full length human mitochondrial DNA. The program allows the user to upload an alternative reference sequence.
The output consists of the extracted variable sites, aligned in fasta format format.
Typically the input DNA sequences are of the same length and the differences consist of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and small insertions/deletions. More details about how sifter works can be found here