Basic Local Alignment Search Tool
BLAST is a set of similarity search programs designed to explore all of the available sequence databases regardless of whether the query is protein or DNA. It uses a heuristic algorithm which seeks local as opposed to global alignments, and is therefore able to detect relationships among sequences which share only isolated regions of similarity. It can be run locally as a full executable, and can be used to run BLAST searches against private, local databases, or downloaded copies of the NCBI databases. It runs on Mac OS, Win32, LINUX, Solaris, IBM AIX, SGI, Compaq OSF, and HP- UX systems.
| Licenses | Open Software |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | POSIX Solaris IRIX Linux |
Recent releases
- 17 Apr 2009 11:54
Changes: This release adds support for spaces in database pathnames on Windows, fixes an ordering bug in queries, and modifies the 2-hit blastn algorithm so that no overlap is allowed between hits. Ungapped blastn searches now allow arbitrary reward/penalty scores. Seedtop now has gilist support.
- 18 Dec 2008 08:37
Changes: The BLASTDB environment variable now supports multiple database search paths. When possible, a smaller protein lookup table is used to improve performance. formatrpsdb now supports creating databases larger than 2G. seedtop now supports searches with gi lists. The X3 value for blastn/megablast was corrected.
- 02 Apr 2008 20:17
Changes: Numerous minor bugs were fixed. Assorted minor feature enhancements were done.
- 19 Dec 2007 11:00
Changes: Assorted minor bugfixes and code cleanups.
- 12 Apr 2007 02:05
Changes: Performance improvements were made for nucleotide searches. XML output for the masking of ungapped translating searches has been fixed. Assorted object manager and memory leaks were fixed along with filtering of low-complexity regions at the ends of a sequence.
