2012-05-25

BLAST tabular output missing descriptions

This is an open letter to the NCBI BLAST+ team to request two simple enhancements which I think would be extremely useful - first and foremost the option to include BLAST result descriptions in the tabular output. Having the taxonomic identifiers (if available) would be great too - allowing downstream filtering of BLAST results by species etc.

Update: See end of post, BLAST 2.2.28+ added most of these features :)

2012-05-18

BLAST+ ignoring search space size for e-values

Sometimes using BLAST is frustrating. Today I'm writing about it returning different expectation values, and therefore different answers, depending on if you use a FASTA subject file, or a database made from that file. I noticed something funny a while ago, but didn't immediately investigate and report it (which I regret). In the continued absence of an official public bug tracker for NCBI BLAST, I'm again going to blog about it here, so people can find it via Google, and email this to the NCBI.