Welcome to the REFRESH Bioinformatics Group

We are a group of researchers developing various tools for bioinformatics data analysis and processing. Our aim is to tackle complex bioinformatics problems that require a lot of resources (time, memory) and design algorithms (as well as implement them) as efficent as possible (in terms of results quality, time, and memory requirements). Our most popular tools are: KMC (k-mer counter), FAMSA (multiple sequence alignment of proteins for huge datasets), AGC (compressor fo assemled genomes), Vclust alignment-based tool for fast and accurate calculation of Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI) between complete or metagenomically-assembled viral genomes, Kmer-db (k-mer-based tools for large-scale analyses of nucleotide datasets), CoLoRd (cutting-edge compressor for 3rd generation sequencing data).

We are a part of the Department of Algorithms and Software of Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland. Nevertheless, some of our tools were prepared in close collaboration with researchers from various universities.

News

10 Jul 2026

Preprint describing MKMC, for counting k-mers in multiple samples is now in bioRxiv.

22 Apr 2026

Paper describing sc-SPLASH for reference-free discovery with barcoded single-cell sequencing is published in Natur Biotechnology.

14 Apr 2026

Paper describing FAMSA2, a tool for making MSA of huge protein families is published in Nature Biotechnology.

10 Apr 2026

Paper describing MDCompress for compression of molecular dynamics simulation trajectories in published in Bioinformatics.

15 May 2025

Paper describing Vclust, a tool for clustering huge viral genome collections in published in Nature Methods.

24 Dec 2024

Paper describing sc-SPLASH, SPLASH2 extension for single-cell data is deposited in bioRxiv.org.

23 Oct 2024

Paper about painting genomes using a colored de Bruijn graph is now at NAR GAB.

23 Sep 2024

Paper introducing SPLASH2 for unsupervised discovery from raw sequencing reads is published in Nature Biotechnology.

10 Jul 2024

Paper describing ProteStAr, our CIF/PDF file compressor is published in Bioinformatics.

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