A new version of the popular BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) bioinformatics tool has been released. FSA-BLAST is twice as fast as NCBI-BLAST with no loss in accuracy. These speed gains are due to a range of improvements to the BLAST algorithm that are described in detail in recent scientific publications [1].

The FSA-BLAST software is designed to be as similar as possible in usage to the NCBI-BLAST application. Results are output in an almost identical format. Most command line options are the same, and parameters such as word length, hit threshold, alignment dropoff and gapped alignment trigger are comparable to NCBI-BLAST. FSA-BLAST uses the exact same statistical analysis to evaluate E-values and normalized scores for alignments.

The new software is freely available under the BSD license agreement. To download a copy, visit the FSA-BLAST project homepage.

URL

http://www.fsa-blast.org

References:
1. http://www.fsa-blast.org/#papers