Roary

Roary is a name associated with more than one topic in popular culture and science. One notable use is Roary the Racing Car, a British CGI children's television series. The show centers on Roary, a red racing car who lives and competes at the Silver Hatch racing circuit. Roary and his friends encounter various adventures, learning lessons about teamwork, fair play, and sportsmanship. The series premiered on CBeebies in 2007 and has been broadcast in multiple countries, appealing to preschool audiences with its lighthearted stories and colorful animation.

In a different context, Roary refers to a software pipeline for pan-genome analysis of prokaryotes. Roary is designed to analyze large collections of annotated genomes, clustering genes into orthologous groups and producing a gene presence/absence matrix across genomes as well as core-genome alignments for phylogenetic studies. It typically accepts annotated genome data in GFF3 format produced by tools such as Prokka, and emphasizes speed and scalability. Roary relies on external tools for its computation, including CD-HIT for pre-clustering, BLASTP for sequence similarity searches, and the MCL algorithm for clustering. The pipeline is implemented in Perl and runs on Unix-like systems, making it a widely used resource in microbial genomics for comparative analyses of bacterial species.