Dbcanlight is a lightweight rewrite of a widely used CAZyme annotation tool rundbcan. It uses pyhmmer, a Cython binding to HMMER3, in place of the HMMER3 CLI suite as the backend for search processes, improving multithreading performance. In addition, it removes a limitation in rundbcan that required manual splitting of large sequence files beforehand.

The main program dbcanlight comprises three modules - build, search and conclude. The build module help to download the required databases from dbcan website; the search module searches against protein HMM, substrate HMM or diamond databases and reports the hits separately; and the conclude module gathers all the results made by each module and provides a summary. The output format closely resembles that of rundbcan, with minor cleanup. For example, rundbcan may report the same substrate multiple times for a gene matching several profiles with that substrate, whereas dbcanlight reports it only once.

Dbcanlight only reimplemented the core features of run_dbcan, that is searching for CAZyme and substrate matches by hmmer/diamond/dbcansub. Submodules like signalP, CGCFinder, etc. are not implemented.