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. License: Open Software License 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.