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Is there any free ultra-fast resource for doing blast?

Dear all,

As far as we all know, doing blast in the NGS filed is really time-consuming and impossible in the routine way. Could anybody please let me know is there a free ultra-fast resource to be able to submit such a blast job there and get the output? Thanks in advance for your helpful comments.

rna-seq assembly blast

Does your university or an associated group have a HPC cluster available? You could use this to parallelize your blast runs using tools like gnu parallel.

3 answers

There are fast alternatives to blast, for example Diamond or RAPsearch2. Regarding seta's suggestion to use usearch. I participate in the development of a more sensitive version called vsearch (not faster than usearch though).

Nice update!

Hello,

You could have a look on the academic version of Klast; for instance, it provides the same quality as blast but is 5x faster than blastp and up to 10x faster than blastx.

If you have access to it, you can check this paper that compares some blast-like tools with the help on different quality metrics.

OP could also do a small bench mark, say take 1000 contigs from their data and run them on both programs to show they reach similar results, will be good to have when review comes around.

Take a look at usearch

Thanks for your prompt feedback. I know it, but I don't work with it as I heard that it is not as sensitive as blast, it is? I would like to do "blastn" and "blastx" on assembled contigs of non-model plants, which has few sequencing data in the public resources, in your opinion, using of "usearch" instead of blast is a suitable in my case?

Hard to say. I do not your aim. I will give it a try anyway.

My goal is to do blast to evaluate the quality of de novo transcriptome assembly. I don't think it is a good choice, if anyone has an experience on it, please correct me and share your assessment of this tool? thanks

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