BOL: Related items

NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available

Neel — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 02:36:13 -0500

#NCBIBLAST+ 2.14.1 now available with improved documentation, faster and more reliable database downloads, and some bug fixes.

Check out the changes they made.

They added the cleanup-blastdb-volumes.py script to remove unused BLAST database volumes. Read the documentation here.

They also switched the protocol from ftp to https to access BLAST databases for increased performance and reliability when downloading data from the NCBI with the update_blastdb.pl script.

And fixed a few bugs related to downloading data from the NCBI, and mt_mode crashing blastn and blastx.

Check out the release notes.

Download BLAST+ 2.14.1

Questions or comments? Please write the BLAST help desk.

More info and download: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/blast-news/2023-BLAST-News.html

Basics of BLAST Programs !

BioStar — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 06:04:26 -0500

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a powerful bioinformatics program used to compare an input sequence (such as DNA, RNA, or protein sequences) against a database of sequences to find regions of similarity. Developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), BLAST is widely used for identifying species, finding functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences, and predicting the function of novel sequences.

Key Features of BLAST:
1. Sequence Comparison: BLAST searches for local alignments between the query sequence and sequences in a database. It identifies regions of similarity, which can help infer functional and evolutionary relationships.

2. Speed and Efficiency: BLAST uses heuristic algorithms, making it faster than exhaustive search methods, suitable for large-scale database searches.

3. Versatility: There are several versions of BLAST for different types of sequence comparisons:
- blastn: Compares a nucleotide query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database.
- blastp: Compares a protein query sequence against a protein sequence database.
- blastx: Compares a nucleotide query sequence translated in all reading frames against a protein sequence database.
- tblastn: Compares a protein query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database translated in all reading frames.
- tblastx: Compares the six-frame translations of a nucleotide query sequence against the six-frame translations of a nucleotide sequence database.

4. Scoring and E-value: BLAST results are scored based on the quality and length of the alignments. The E-value (expect value) indicates the number of alignments one can expect to find by chance, with lower E-values representing more significant matches.

5. Output Formats: BLAST provides results in various formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, and JSON, making it adaptable for different types of analyses and integrations with other tools.

Applications of BLAST:
- Genomic Research: Identifying genes, understanding genetic diversity, and mapping genome sequences.
- Protein Function Prediction: Inferring the function of unknown proteins by comparing them to known protein sequences.
- Evolutionary Studies: Exploring evolutionary relationships between organisms by comparing their genetic material.
- Medical Research: Identifying pathogens, understanding disease mechanisms, and developing treatments by comparing sequences of interest.

Overall, BLAST is an essential tool in bioinformatics, offering a reliable and efficient way to analyze and interpret biological sequence data.

NCBI BLAST have added new columns to the Descriptions

Neel — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:56:07 -0600

NCBI BLAST have added new columns to the Descriptions Table for web BLAST output. The new columns are Scientific Name, Common Name, Taxid, and Accession Length. Common Name and Accession Length are now part of the default display. You can click 'Select columns' or 'Manage columns' to add or remove columns from the display Your preferences will be saved for your next visit to BLAST, and when you download your results, whatever columns you have displayed will be saved. See the NCBI Insights post (https://go.usa.gov/x7fPE) for more details.

SATSUMA : Highly sensitive whole-genome synteny alignments.

Jit — Fri, 13 May 2016 05:25:26 -0500

Satsuma is a whole-genome synteny alignment program. It takes two genomes, computes alignments, and then keeps only the parts that are orthologous, i.e. following the conserved order and orientation of features, such as protein coding genes, non-coding genes, or neutral sequences. Satsuma does not require any pre-processing, such as repeat masking, since it will automatically detect ambiguous mappings.

Satsuma has parallelization built-in and is designed to run on multi-core architectures. The run-time for aligning two bird-size genomes (~1.2 Gb) is around two days on 24 CPUs.

You can find the manual here.
Download the latest source code from here.
Stable versions can also be downloaded from the Broad Institute's web site.

An incomplete list of questions and answers (yes, these have really been asked by our users! Please feel free to add your own by e-mailing us) is here.

If you use Satsuma in your research, please cite:
Grabherr, M. G., Russell, P., Meyer, M., Mauceli, E., Alföldi, J., Di Palma, F., & Lindblad-Toh, K. (2010). Genome-wide synteny through highly sensitive sequence alignment: Satsuma. Bioinformatics, 26(9), 1145-51.

Tutorial at http://evomics.org/learning/genomics/satsuma/

Address of the bookmark: http://satsuma.sourceforge.net/

Elastic BLAST !

Abhi — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 18:14:57 -0500

ElasticBLAST is a new way to BLAST large numbers of queries, faster and on the cloud. Here are the top three reasons you should use ElasticBLAST:

1. ElasticBLAST can handle much LARGER queries!

ElasticBLAST can search query sets that have hundreds to millions of sequences and against BLAST databases of all sizes.

2. ElasticBLAST is FASTER

ElasticBLAST distributes your searches across multiple cloud instances to process them simultaneously. The ability to scale resources in this way allows you to process large numbers of queries in a shorter time than you could with BLAST+.

3. ElasticBLAST is EASY to run on the cloud

ElasticBLAST is easy to set up using our step-by-step instructions (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP)) and allows you to leverage the power of the cloud. Once configured, it manages the software and database installation, handles partitioning of the BLAST workload among the various instances, and deallocates cloud resources when the searches are done.

ElasticBLAST also selects the instance (i.e., machine) type for you based on database size. Of course, you can also choose the instance type manually if you prefer.

Address of the bookmark: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/elastic-blast/

Understanding BLASTn output format 6 !

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 18:38:21 -0500

BLASTn output format 6

BLASTn maps DNA against DNA, for example gene sequences against a reference genome

blastn -query genes.ffn -subject genome.fna -outfmt 6

BLASTn tabular output format 6

Column headers:
qseqid sseqid pident length mismatch gapopen qstart qend sstart send evalue bitscore

1.	qseqid	query (e.g., gene) sequence id
2.	sseqid	subject (e.g., reference genome) sequence id
3.	pident	percentage of identical matches
4.	length	alignment length
5.	mismatch	number of mismatches
6.	gapopen	number of gap openings
7.	qstart	start of alignment in query
8.	qend	end of alignment in query
9.	sstart	start of alignment in subject
10.	send	end of alignment in subject
11.	evalue	expect value
12.	bitscore	bit score

Define your own output format

by adding the option -outfmt, as for example:

-outfmt "6 qseqid sseqid pident qlen length mismatch gapope evalue bitscore"

supported format specifiers are:
qseqid    Query Seq-id
qgi   Query GI
qacc    Query accesion
qaccver   Query accesion.version
qlen    Query sequence length
sseqid    Subject Seq-id
sallseqid All subject Seq-id(s), separated by a ';'
sgi       Subject GI
sallgi    All subject GIs
sacc      Subject accession
saccver   Subject accession.version
sallacc   All subject accessions
slen      Subject sequence length
qstart    Start of alignment in query
qend    End of alignment in query
sstart    Start of alignment in subject
send      End of alignment in subject
qseq      Aligned part of query sequence
sseq      Aligned part of subject sequence
evalue    Expect value
bitscore  Bit score
score   Raw score
length    Alignment length
pident    Percentage of identical matches
nident    Number of identical matches
mismatch  Number of mismatches
positive  Number of positive-scoring matches
gapopen   Number of gap openings
gaps      Total number of gaps
ppos      Percentage of positive-scoring matches
frames    Query and subject frames separated by a '/'
qframe    Query frame
sframe    Subject frame
btop      Blast traceback operations (BTOP)
staxids   Subject Taxonomy ID(s), separated by a ';'
sscinames Subject Scientific Name(s), separated by a ';'
scomnames Subject Common Name(s), separated by a ';'
sblastnames Subject Blast Name(s), separated by a ';'   (in alphabetical order)
sskingdoms  Subject Super Kingdom(s), separated by a ';'     (in alphabetical order)
stitle    Subject Title
salltitles  All Subject Title(s), separated by a '<>'
sstrand   Subject Strand
qcovs   Query Coverage Per Subject
qcovhsp   Query Coverage Per HSP

default values are:
-outfmt "6 qseqid sseqid pident length mismatch gapopen qstart qend sstart send evalue bitscore"

Kalign: fast multiple sequence alignment program for biological sequences.

BioStar — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:20:41 -0500

Kalign is a fast multiple sequence alignment program for biological sequences.

Align sequences and output the alignment in MSF format:

kalign -i BB11001.tfa -f msf  -o out.msf

Align sequences and output the alignment in clustal format:

kalign -i BB11001.tfa -f clu -o out.clu

Re-align sequences in an existing alignment:

kalign -i BB11001.msf  -o out.afa

Reformat existing alignment:

kalign -i BB11001.msf -r afa -o out.afa

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/TimoLassmann/kalign

NCBI Magic-BLAST

Jit — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:11:11 -0500

Magic-BLAST is a tool for mapping large next-generation RNA or DNA sequencing runs against a whole genome or transcriptome. Each alignment optimizes a composite score, taking into account simultaneously the two reads of a pair, and in case of RNA-seq, locating the candidate introns and adding up the score of all exons. This is very different from other versions of BLAST, where each exon is scored as a separate hit and read-pairing is ignored.

Magic-BLAST incorporates within the NCBI BLAST code framework ideas developed in the NCBI Magic pipeline, in particular hit extensions by local walk and jump (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26109056), and recursive clipping of mismatches near the edges of the reads, which avoids accumulating artefactual mismatches near splice sites and is needed to distinguish short indels from substitutions near the edges.

Address of the bookmark: https://ncbi.github.io/magicblast/

Magic-BLAST

Shruti Paniwala — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 15:18:36 -0500

Address of the bookmark: https://ncbi.github.io/magicblast/

MMseqs2: ultra fast and sensitive sequence search and clustering suite

Manisha Mishra — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 10:47:56 -0600

MMseqs2 (Many-against-Many sequence searching) is a software suite to search and cluster huge protein and nucleotide sequence sets. MMseqs2 is open source GPL-licensed software implemented in C++ for Linux, MacOS, and (as beta version, via cygwin) Windows. The software is designed to run on multiple cores and servers and exhibits very good scalability. MMseqs2 can run 10000 times faster than BLAST. At 100 times its speed it achieves almost the same sensitivity. It can perform profile searches with the same sensitivity as PSI-BLAST at over 400 times its speed.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/soedinglab/MMseqs2