Background Biomedical researchers use alignments produced by BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) to categorize their query sequences. Producing such alignments is an essential bioinformatics task that is well suited for the cloud. The cloud can perform many calculations quickly as well as store and access large volumes of data. Bioinformaticians can also use it to collaborate with other researchers, sharing their results, datasets and even their pipelines on a common platform. Results We present ElasticBLAST, a cloud native application to perform BLAST alignments in the cloud. ElasticBLAST can handle anywhere from a few to many thousands of queries and run the searches on thousands of virtual CPUs (if desired), deleting resources when it is done. It uses cloud native tools for orchestration and can request discounted instances, lowering cloud costs for users. It is supported on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. It can search BLAST databases that are user provided or from the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Conclusion We show that ElasticBLAST is a useful application that can efficiently perform BLAST searches for the user in the cloud, demonstrating that with two examples. At the same time, it hides much of the complexity of working in the cloud, lowering the threshold to move work to the cloud.

We present recent improvements to Magic-BLAST, an RNA-seq mapper that aligns long as well as short reads to target sequences in a BLAST database. The new features include accessing Sequence Read Archive (SRA) reads from cloud buckets, reporting National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) taxonomy ID's, and reporting unaligned reads in a separate file. A powerful Magic-BLAST feature is that it can access reads from SRA by accession, making pipelines with Magic-BLAST more reusable. NCBI hosts SRA data at cloud providers, supporting large scale hyper-parallel data analyses. Magic-BLAST 1.6.0 downloads SRA data from the cloud. Benefits include uninterrupted downloads, faster download speeds, and huge bandwidth for parallel downloads to multiple running processes or cloud instances. Magic-BLAST provides NCBI taxonomy ID's in the SAM report. Using taxonomy ID's allows unambiguous mapping to taxonomic nodes. This is especially useful for metagenomic projects. Magic-BLAST can report unaligned reads in a separate file in SAM, tabular, or FASTA formats. In this fashion Magic-BLAST can, for example, be used as for contamination screening or for separating virus and host reads from a next-generation sequencing run. This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Library of Medicine at the NIH.

With the advent of faster and cheaper sequencing technologies, there exist ever larger amounts of sequence data to analyze. The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a core component of sequence analysis, though analyzing large volumes of sequence data remains a challenge, primarily because of computational demands. In order to leverage the offerings of cloud service providers to address the increased demands of today’s sequence analysis, we developed ElasticBLAST. ElasticBLAST is a cloud-based implementation of BLAST designed to speed up searching and aligning large amounts of nucleotide and protein sequences against NCBI or user-provided BLAST databases. Adhering to an Open Source Philosophy, the source code and documentation for ElasticBLAST are freely available on Github. The sequence databases that ElasticBLAST operates on are also freely available on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)'s FTP site, the Registry of Open Data at AWS, and the Google Cloud Platform. This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Library of Medicine at the NIH

BLAST is a very popular tool, so it is not surprising that this topic has provoked a great deal of interest.The authors have, however, conflated three different issues.One is a bug that will be fixed in the BLASTþ 2.8.1 release due out in December 2018, another is simply how BLAST works and the third might be viewed as a shortcoming of our implementation of compositionbased statistics (CBS).Here, we address these issues and describe some new documentation about the BLAST process.We briefly discuss how BLAST works in order to enable the rest of the discussion.First, BLAST examines all sequences in a database looking for (short) word matches that it can use as a seed.Second, BLAST performs a gap-free extension with seeds found in the first step.Third, if the score of the gap-free extension exceeds a certain threshold (set so that about 1 in 50 sequences pass), it executes a gapped extension.If the expect value of the gapped extension is low enough, BLAST saves it to a list for further processing.Finally, BLAST performs a more careful gapped alignment, based on the list from the last step and returns results to the user.The first step listed above examines all sequences, but the work expended per sequence is small.Each succeeding step examines fewer sequences, but the work per sequence is greater.This description is intended as a brief overview and omits some details.Shah et al. (2018) did not provide their own example in the letter, but later provided one at https://github.com/shahnidhi/BLAST_maxtargetseq_analysis.At the NCBI, we examined the new example and it became clear that the demonstrated behavior was a bug, resulting from an overly aggressive optimization, introduced in 2012 for BLASTN and MegaBLAST (DNA-DNA alignments).This

BackgroundNext-generation sequencing technologies can produce tens of millions of reads, often paired-end, from transcripts or genomes. But few programs can align RNA on the genome and accurately discover introns, especially with long reads. We introduce Magic-BLAST, a new aligner based on ideas from the Magic pipeline.ResultsMagic-BLAST uses innovative techniques that include the optimization of a spliced alignment score and selective masking during seed selection. We evaluate the performance of Magic-BLAST to accurately map short or long sequences and its ability to discover introns on real RNA-seq data sets from PacBio, Roche and Illumina runs, and on six benchmarks, and compare it to other popular aligners. Additionally, we look at alignments of human idealized RefSeq mRNA sequences perfectly matching the genome.ConclusionsWe show that Magic-BLAST is the best at intron discovery over a wide range of conditions and the best at mapping reads longer than 250 bases, from any platform. It is versatile and robust to high levels of mismatches or extreme base composition, and reasonably fast. It can align reads to a BLAST database or a FASTA file. It can accept a FASTQ file as input or automatically retrieve an accession from the SRA repository at the NCBI.

Abstract The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides a large suite of online resources for biological information and data, including the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database and the PubMed database of citations and abstracts published in life science journals. The Entrez system provides search and retrieval operations for most of these data from 38 distinct databases. The E-utilities serve as the programming interface for the Entrez system. Augmenting many of the web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. New resources released in the past year include PubMed Labs and a new sequence database search. Resources that were updated in the past year include PubMed, PMC, Bookshelf, genome data viewer, Assembly, prokaryotic genomes, Genome, BioProject, dbSNP, dbVar, BLAST databases, igBLAST, iCn3D and PubChem. All of these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides a large suite of online resources for biological information and data, including the GenBank((R)) nucleic acid sequence database and the PubMed database of citations and abstracts for published life science journals. The Entrez system provides search and retrieval operations for most of these data from 37 distinct databases. The E-utilities serve as the programming interface for the Entrez system. Augmenting many of the Web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. New resources released in the past year include iCn3D, MutaBind, and the Antimicrobial Resistance Gene Reference Database; and resources that were updated in the past year include My Bibliography, SciENcv, the Pathogen Detection Project, Assembly, Genome, the Genome Data Viewer, BLAST and PubChem. All of these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

Abstract The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides a large suite of online resources for biological information and data, including the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database and the PubMed database of citations and abstracts for published life science journals. The Entrez system provides search and retrieval operations for most of these data from 39 distinct databases. The E-utilities serve as the programming interface for the Entrez system. Augmenting many of the Web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. New resources released in the past year include PubMed Data Management, RefSeq Functional Elements, genome data download, variation services API, Magic-BLAST, QuickBLASTp, and Identical Protein Groups. Resources that were updated in the past year include the genome data viewer, a human genome resources page, Gene, virus variation, OSIRIS, and PubChem. All of these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

The NCBI FTP server contains a BLAST-specific directory (ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ blast/). Through this directory, the standalone BLAST packages and a standard set of BLAST databases are available to the public for download through anonymous FTP. For faster download, the service is also available through the Aspera client for those users with the Aspera browser plug-in installed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/public/?blast/). This document describes the subdirectories and file contents of the BLAST FTP directory. Technical details on how to use certain files, especially those under the db (database) subdirectory, are also provided.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides a large suite of online resources for biological information and data, including the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database and the PubMed database of citations and abstracts for published life science journals. Additional NCBI resources focus on literature (Bookshelf, PubMed Central (PMC) and PubReader); medical genetics (ClinVar, dbMHC, the Genetic Testing Registry, HIV-1/Human Protein Interaction Database and MedGen); genes and genomics (BioProject, BioSample, dbSNP, dbVar, Epigenomics, Gene, Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), Genome, HomoloGene, the Map Viewer, Nucleotide, PopSet, Probe, RefSeq, Sequence Read Archive, the Taxonomy Browser, Trace Archive and UniGene); and proteins and chemicals (Biosystems, COBALT, the Conserved Domain Database (CDD), the Conserved Domain Architecture Retrieval Tool (CDART), the Molecular Modeling Database (MMDB), Protein Clusters, Protein and the PubChem suite of small molecule databases). The Entrez system provides search and retrieval operations for many of these databases. Augmenting many of the Web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. All of these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

Summary The comparison of nucleotide or protein sequences from the same or different organisms is a very powerful tool in molecular biology. By finding similarities between sequences, scientists can infer the function of newly sequenced genes, predict new members of gene families, and explore evolutionary relationships. Now that whole genomes are being sequenced, sequence similarity searching can be used to predict the location and function of protein-coding and transcriptionregulation regions in genomic DNA. Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) (1, 2) is the tool most frequently used for calculating sequence similarity. BLAST comes in variations for use with different query sequences against different databases. All BLAST applications, as well as information on which BLAST program to use and other help documentation, are listed on the BLAST homepage [http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/]. This chapter will focus more on how BLAST works, its output, and how both the output and program itself can be further manipulated or customized, rather than on how to use BLAST [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Education/BLASTinfo/information3.html] or interpret BLAST results.

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) website at the National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) is an important resource for searching and aligning sequences. A new BLAST report allows faster loading of alignments, adds navigation aids, allows easy downloading of subject sequences and reports and has improved usability. Here, we describe these improvements to the BLAST report, discuss design decisions, describe other improvements to the search page and database documentation and outline plans for future development. The NCBI BLAST URL is http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

In addition to maintaining the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) provides analysis and retrieval resources for the data in GenBank and other biological data made available through the NCBI Web site. NCBI resources include Entrez, the Entrez Programming Utilities, MyNCBI, PubMed, PubMed Central, PubReader, Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy Browser, BLAST, BLAST Link, Primer-BLAST, COBALT, RefSeq, UniGene, HomoloGene, ProtEST, dbMHC, dbSNP, dbVar, Epigenomics, the Genetic Testing Registry, Genome and related tools, the Map Viewer, Trace Archive, Sequence Read Archive, BioProject, BioSample, ClinVar, MedGen, HIV-1/Human Protein Interaction Database, Gene Expression Omnibus, Probe, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals, the Molecular Modeling Database, the Conserved Domain Database, the Conserved Domain Architecture Retrieval Tool, Biosystems, Protein Clusters and the PubChem suite of small molecule databases. Augmenting many of the Web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. All these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page.

The variable domain of an immunoglobulin (IG) sequence is encoded by multiple genes, including the variable (V) gene, the diversity (D) gene and the joining (J) gene. Analysis of IG sequences typically requires identification of each gene, as well as a comparison of sequence variations in the context of defined regions. General purpose tools, such as the BLAST program, have only limited use for such tasks, as the rearranged nature of an IG sequence and the variable length of each gene requires multiple rounds of BLAST searches for a single IG sequence. Additionally, manual assembly of different genes is difficult and error-prone. To address these issues and to facilitate other common tasks in analysing IG sequences, we have developed the sequence analysis tool IgBLAST (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/igblast/). With this tool, users can view the matches to the germline V, D and J genes, details at rearrangement junctions, the delineation of IG V domain framework regions and complementarity determining regions. IgBLAST has the capability to analyse nucleotide and protein sequences and can process sequences in batches. Furthermore, IgBLAST allows searches against the germline gene databases and other sequence databases simultaneously to minimize the chance of missing possibly the best matching germline V gene.

BACKGROUND:Local alignment programs often calculate the probability that a match occurred by chance. The calculation of this probability may require a "finite-size" correction to the lengths of the sequences, as an alignment that starts near the end of either sequence may run out of sequence before achieving a significant score.FINDINGS:We present an improved finite-size correction that considers the distribution of sequence lengths rather than simply the corresponding means. This approach improves sensitivity and avoids substituting an ad hoc length for short sequences that can underestimate the significance of a match. We use a test set derived from ASTRAL to show improved ROC scores, especially for shorter sequences.CONCLUSIONS:The new finite-size correction improves the calculation of probabilities for a local alignment. It is now used in the BLAST+ package and at the NCBI BLAST web site ( http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

BACKGROUND:Choosing appropriate primers is probably the single most important factor affecting the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Specific amplification of the intended target requires that primers do not have matches to other targets in certain orientations and within certain distances that allow undesired amplification. The process of designing specific primers typically involves two stages. First, the primers flanking regions of interest are generated either manually or using software tools; then they are searched against an appropriate nucleotide sequence database using tools such as BLAST to examine the potential targets. However, the latter is not an easy process as one needs to examine many details between primers and targets, such as the number and the positions of matched bases, the primer orientations and distance between forward and reverse primers. The complexity of such analysis usually makes this a time-consuming and very difficult task for users, especially when the primers have a large number of hits. Furthermore, although the BLAST program has been widely used for primer target detection, it is in fact not an ideal tool for this purpose as BLAST is a local alignment algorithm and does not necessarily return complete match information over the entire primer range.RESULTS:We present a new software tool called Primer-BLAST to alleviate the difficulty in designing target-specific primers. This tool combines BLAST with a global alignment algorithm to ensure a full primer-target alignment and is sensitive enough to detect targets that have a significant number of mismatches to primers. Primer-BLAST allows users to design new target-specific primers in one step as well as to check the specificity of pre-existing primers. Primer-BLAST also supports placing primers based on exon/intron locations and excluding single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sites in primers.CONCLUSIONS:We describe a robust and fully implemented general purpose primer design tool that designs target-specific PCR primers. Primer-BLAST offers flexible options to adjust the specificity threshold and other primer properties. This tool is publicly available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/primer-blast.

BLAST is a commonly-used software package for comparing a query sequence to a database of known sequences; in this study, we focus on protein sequences. Position-specific-iterated BLAST (PSI-BLAST) iteratively searches a protein sequence database, using the matches in round i to construct a position-specific score matrix (PSSM) for searching the database in round i + 1. Biegert and Söding developed Context-sensitive BLAST (CS-BLAST), which combines information from searching the sequence database with information derived from a library of short protein profiles to achieve better homology detection than PSI-BLAST, which builds its PSSMs from scratch.