Well, here’s a simple implementation of an MSD radix sort for DNA. It’s written in D because that’s the language that I use most and therefore am least likely to make silly mistakes in, but it could easily be translated to some other language. It’s in-place but requires 2 * seq.length passes through the array.

void radixSort(string[] seqs, size_t base = 0) {
    if(seqs.length == 0)
        return;

    size_t TPos = seqs.length, APos = 0;
    size_t i = 0;
    while(i < TPos) {
        if(seqs[i][base] == 'A') {
             swap(seqs[i], seqs[APos++]);
             i++;
        }
        else if(seqs[i][base] == 'T') {
            swap(seqs[i], seqs[--TPos]);
        } else i++;
    }

    i = APos;
    size_t CPos = APos;
    while(i < TPos) {
        if(seqs[i][base] == 'C') {
            swap(seqs[i], seqs[CPos++]);
        }
        i++;
    }
    if(base < seqs[0].length - 1) {
        radixSort(seqs[0..APos], base + 1);
        radixSort(seqs[APos..CPos], base + 1);
        radixSort(seqs[CPos..TPos], base + 1);
        radixSort(seqs[TPos..seqs.length], base + 1);
   }
}

Obviously, this is kind of specific to DNA, as opposed to being general, but it should be fast.

Edit:

I got curious whether this code actually works, so I tested/debugged it while waiting for my own bioinformatics code to run. The version above now is actually tested and works. For 10 million sequences of 5 bases each, it’s about 3x faster than an optimized introsort.