Are you a biomedical researcher working with mountains of sequence data? Do you spend countless hours running BLAST searches, trying to categorize your findings and unlock new insights? If so, you’re likely familiar with the challenges: the computational demands, the storage requirements, and the sheer time it takes to get results. But what if there was a way to accelerate your sequence searches, leverage the power of cloud computing, and simplify the entire process? That’s where ElasticBLAST comes in.

What is ElasticBLAST?

ElasticBLAST is a cloud-native application designed to make BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) alignments faster, more efficient, and more accessible. It’s essentially a streamlined way to run BLAST in the cloud (specifically Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform), taking advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that the cloud offers.

Why should you care?

• Speed: ElasticBLAST can handle anything from a handful to thousands of queries, distributing the workload across numerous virtual CPUs. This means faster results, allowing you to analyze more data in less time.

• Cost-Effective: ElasticBLAST is designed to use discounted cloud instances (like spot instances on AWS or preemptible instances on GCP), significantly reducing your computing costs.

• Easy to use: One of the biggest hurdles to using the cloud is its complexity. ElasticBLAST automates the setup and teardown of instances for your BLAST searches, hiding much of the underlying infrastructure and making it easier to get started.

• Flexibility: Whether you’re using NCBI’s curated databases or your own custom databases, ElasticBLAST can handle it. It provides the flexibility to work with the data that matters most to your research.

• Cloud Native: By leveraging container orchestration (Kubernetes), batch compute frameworks (AWS Batch), serverless computing services (AWS Lambda), and object storage ElasticBLAST utilizes the benefits of cloud computing, where the cloud provider takes responsibility for maintaining, optimizing and securing managed services.

How Does It Work? ElasticBLAST takes your query sequences, splits them into manageable batches, and distributes them across a cluster of virtual machines in the cloud. It then compares these batches against your chosen BLAST database, using the robust BLAST+ software. The results are saved to cloud storage, ready for your analysis. Best of all, ElasticBLAST automates much of this process, from provisioning the virtual machines to cleaning up resources when the search is complete.

Who is it for? ElasticBLAST is ideal for biomedical researchers, bioinformaticians, and anyone who needs to perform large-scale sequence alignments. Whether you’re identifying RNA contamination or exploring complex genomic datasets, ElasticBLAST can help you unlock insights faster and more efficiently.

*Ready to Get Started? If you’re ready to take your sequence searches to the next level, it’s time to explore ElasticBLAST. It’s a powerful tool that can help you harness the full potential of cloud computing and accelerate your research.

Citation and References

primary literature1.

Large Scale Sequence alignment2.

Basic local alignment search tool3.

  1. Camacho, C., Boratyn, G.M., Joukov, V., Vera Alvarez, R. and Madden, T.L., 2023. ElasticBLAST: accelerating sequence search via cloud computing. BMC bioinformatics, 24(1), p.117. ↩

  2. Lal, D. and Verma, M., 2017. Large-scale sequence comparison. Bioinformatics: Volume I: Data, Sequence Analysis, and Evolution, pp.191-224. ↩

  3. Altschul, S.F., Gish, W., Miller, W., Myers, E.W. and Lipman, D.J., 1990. Basic local alignment search tool. Journal of molecular biology, 215(3), pp.403-410. ↩