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BLAST+: Powerful Applications for Sequence Analysis

Friday, November 08, 2013 — Poster Session IV

2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

FAES Academic Center (Upper-Level Terrace)

NLM

COMPBIO-2

Authors

  • G.M. Boratyn
  • C. Camacho
  • A. Fong
  • N. Ma
  • T.L. Madden

Abstract

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is one of the more popular methods for searching sequence databases. The stand-alone BLAST+ applications allow users to run a variety of different searches on their own hardware. These range from nucleotide-nucleotide comparisons with megaBLAST to searches that employ a Position Specific Scoring Matrix with DELTA-BLAST and PSI-BLAST. We describe the stand-alone BLAST+ applications and discuss some features that users are often not aware of. These include the ability to save search strategies for future execution as well as the ability to save search results in a structured format so that multiple BLAST reports (e.g., tabular or XML) can be produced at a later date upon demand. We also discuss the database masking feature of the BLAST+ suite which can mask regions (e.g., simple and interspersed repeats) in the database sequences. Finally, we also describe the wide variety of reports that BLAST+ suite can produce and discuss possible future improvements.

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