BLAST

BLAST is a new suite of  tools that can be used to find regions of local similarity between sequences.  The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families.

The lastest version is also referred to as BLAST+  and it has a number of performance and feature improvements over the legacy BLAST applications. For details, please see the BLAST user manual and the article in BMC Bioinformatics (PubMed link). Additional information can be found on the NCBI web site: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST. Additionally, we also have rmblast 2.2.28, a fork of BLAST+ which is compatible with Repeat Masker.

• Version: BLAST 2.3.0+
• Machine: All clusters
• Location: /uufs/chpc.utah.edu/sys/installdir/blast/2.3.0+

Along with the BLAST search tools, CHPC also has established a process to automatically update  a local copy ncbi databases in /uufs/chpc.utah.edu/32bit-sys/pkg/blastdb. The module mentioned below sets this location to the BLASTDB variable as expected by the blast installation.

There is a module that can be loaded by

module load blast

that will set the environment variables necessary to use both the blast installation as well as the downloaded databases.

For questions about  the CHPC installation contact Anita Orendt.