BOL: Related items

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.

Magic-BLAST

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

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

NCBI PSI-BLAST Tutorial

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 02:25:02 -0500

http:--www.biotechnology.jhu.edu- Tutorial for PSI-BLAST, an extension of BLAST that uses matrix algebra. BLAST is a cornerstone bioinformatics tool at NCBI. BLAST is the Basic Local Alignment Search tool and will protein and DNA sequences that are related to a sequence that the user provides.

Magic-BLAST: a tool for mapping large next-generation RNA or DNA sequencing runs against a whole genome or transcriptome.

Jit — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 22:23:39 -0600

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/

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

BLAST nr version 5 database, (nr_v5)

Jit — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 11:35:35 -0500

NCBI have made changes the nr version 5 database, (nr_v5), to facilitate better search results and improved performance by reducing the number of redundant titles in the nr_v5 database used by webBLAST, which is also available for BLAST+ users.

The changes in nr preserve the taxonomic diversity of the entries in the database while reducing the number of titles for identical sequences. GenPept accessions are still accessible via www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/$GENBANK_ACCESSION or the IPG website https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ipg/.

The "Identical Proteins" link in the alignments section of the webBLAST results takes you to a full list of all accessions associated with a sequence.

For BLAST+ users downloading nr_v5: the database is now approximately 50% smaller, resulting in faster downloads and BLAST searches, and smaller disk space requirements. The database is downloadable at: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/db/v5/

For BLAST+ there is a cleanup script to help you manage the transition to this smaller database. The script removes unused database volumes: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/temp/cleanup-blastdb-volumes.py

Here are the new rules on how we keep titles in nr_v5:

1. We keep all refseq, swissprot, pir and PDB titles.

2. We keep any GenPept titles with a TAXID that has not already been seen in the record.

3. We keep at least five GenPept titles regardless of whether the TAXIDS have been seen before or not in this record.

BLAST+ 2.10.0 released

Jit — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 20:44:11 -0600

The BLAST+ 2.10.0 release is now available from at FTP site. The new version offers the following improvements:

updated composition-based statistics for protein-protein (including translated BLAST) comparisons to provide stable results when you request fewer than the default number of results
an experimental Adaptive Composition Based Statistics option that increases the likelihood of finding novel results. To enable this option set the environment variable ADAPTIVE_CBS to 1. We welcome your feedback on this new option.

See the release notes for details on more improvements and bug fixes with this release.

BLAST+ is also available in docker, please read more for details.

The new version fully supports the version 5 (v5) databases with built in taxonomy and other improvements. For more information on v5 databases (download), see the previous NCBI Insights article and the recording of our webinar. If you are still using the older version 4 (v4) databases, we recommend you begin using the v5 version as soon as possible. We will discontinue updates to the older v4 databases in early 2020.

BLAST+ Team

Webinar on RNA-Seq Data Analysis on 28 Feb 2018

Strand — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 06:38:48 -0600

Strand NGS is a biologist friendly NGS analysis tool that allows biologists to analyze their data using a very intuitive workflow for the analysis and visualization of RNA-Seq data. This webinar will give an overview of the workflow which includes Transcriptome/ Genome alignment, Differential expression analysis, Splicing events and gene fusion detection. Strand NGS also supports novel discovery like identification of novel genes, exons and novel splice junctions.
We will highlight the use of Strand NGS features such as PCA, sample correlation, clustering, Venn diagrams, CVA, UMI support and elastic genome browser used in RNA-Seq workflow that supports large scale RNA-Seq data analysis too. The tool also supports biological contextualization on the set of interesting genes from the data by allowing downstream analysis such as GO and pathway analysis. The product has an option to create pipelines for time consuming jobs which automates analysis and leaves more time for end data interpretation. This webinar will give an overview of the features in the RNA-Seq data analysis workflow in Strand NGS.

Details:
Session 1: 28 Feb 2018, 9 AM CET
Session 2: 28 Feb 2018, 8 AM PST
Register here: http://www.strand-ngs.com/webinar_registration

About Speaker:

Dr. Suman Kapoor, Manager- Application Science at Strand Life Sciences, has over 11 years experience in molecular biology, next-generation sequencing based testing, clinical genomics, and personalized medicine for disease management and prenatal testing. Dr. Suman holds a Ph.D in Molecular and Cell Biology from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Prior to joining Strand NGS team, Suman has worked extensively on protein synthesis in eubacteria and has experience working in CAP and NABL accredited lab validating and interpreting NGS based diagnostic tests.

A fast package to parse BLAST

Jitendra Narayan — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 16:58:56 -0500

In current era, we are handling huge amount of genomics data, and analysing it to make some biological sense out of it. Large-scale sequence studies requiring BLAST-based analysis produce huge amounts of data to be parsed. There are several BLAST parsers are available, but they are often missing some important features, such as keeping all information from the raw BLAST output, allowing direct access to single results, and performing logical operations over them.

Massimiliano Orsini and Simone Carcangiu develope a new and fast fast package "BlaSTorage" to parse and store BLAST results. BlaSTorage shows comparable speed of more basic parser written in compiled languages as C++ and can be easily integrated into web applications or software pipelines.

Find more @ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3571973/

http://biowiki.crs4.it/biowiki/MassimilianoOrsini

BLAST Ring Image Generator (BRIG)

Anjana — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 09:18:50 -0500

BRIG is a free cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Unix) application that can display circular comparisons between a large number of genomes, with a focus on handling genome assembly data. The application is available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/brig

If you have any questions or comments, post them on one of the trackers on BRIG’s SourceForge page: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=328245.

Features:

Images show similarity between a central reference sequence and other sequences as concentric rings.
BRIG will perform all BLAST comparisons and file parsing automatically via a simple GUI.
Contig boundaries and read coverage can be displayed for draft genomes; customized graphs and annotations can be displayed.
Using a user-defined set of genes as input, BRIG can display gene presence, absence, truncation or sequence variation in a set of complete genomes, draft genomes or even raw, unassembled sequence data.
BRIG also accepts SAM-formatted read-mapping files enabling genomic regions present in unassembled sequence data from multiple samples to be compared simultaneously

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