BLAST Search

This page enables BLAST searches (Camacho et al., BMC Bioinformatics, 2009) of nucleotide or protein sequences against your genomes in Arx.

First, search and select the genome(s) that you would like to use as reference in the 'Genomes' box and click 'Submit'. Then enter your query sequence(s) in FASTA format and select the appropriate BLAST type from the drop-down menu.

Background processing

BLAST searches run as background jobs. After submitting, you can close the tab or navigate elsewhere — the search continues on the server. Results are saved and can be reopened from the Job Queues page at any time.

BLAST database

Arx maintains an internal BLAST database built from the genomes currently loaded in the system. This database must be built before searches can be performed. On a fresh installation, run python manage_arx.py rebuild-blast-dbs inside the container (see installation). The database is updated automatically when genomes are added or removed.

BLAST behaviour can be tuned with the environment variables BLAST_MAX_THREADS, BLAST_EVALUE, and BLAST_MAX_TARGET_SEQS — see Environment Configuration.