Using BLAST+ for nucleotide alignments
It’s quite some time since I needed to run BLAST locally on anything. Here are some quick notes.
First download BLAST:
1 2 3 | wget ftp : //ftp .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov /blast/executables/blast + /LATEST/ncbi-blast-2 .2.30+-x64-linux. tar .gz tar xvzf ncbi-blast-2.2.30+-x64-linux. tar .gz cd ncbi-blast-2.2.30+ /bin |
Create a new reference database:
1 | ./makeblastdb -in ~/genomics/myreference.fasta -dbtype nucl |
In my case I needed to align fastq files. However BLAST only takes fasta. I used to the following to convert the fastqs to fastas:
1 | awk 'BEGIN{n=0;}{if(n%4 == 0) print ">" substr($0,2); if(n%4 == 1) print $0;n++;}' input.fastq > output.fasta |
And finally run the alignment:
1 | . /blastn -db ~ /genomics/myreference .fasta -query . /output .fasta |