Biotechnologies

Blat is an alignment tool like BLAST, but it is structured differently. On DNA, Blat works by keeping an index of an entire genome in memory. Thus, the target database of BLAT is not a set of GenBank sequences, but instead an index derived from the assembly of the entire genome. The index -- which uses less than a gigabyte of RAM -- consists of all non-overlapping 11-mers except for those heavily involved in repeats. This smaller size means that Blat is far more easily mirrored. Blat of DNA is designed to quickly find sequences of 95% and greater similarity of length 40 bases or more. It may miss more divergent or short sequence alignments.

On proteins, Blat uses 4-mers rather than 11-mers, finding protein sequences of 80% and greater similarity to the query of length 20+ amino acids. The protein index requires slightly more than 2 gigabytes of RAM. In practice -- due to sequence divergence rates over evolutionary time -- DNA Blat works well within humans and primates, while protein Blat continues to find good matches within terrestrial vertebrates and even earlier organisms for conserved proteins. Within humans, protein Blat gives a much better picture of gene families (paralogs) than DNA Blat. However, BLAST and psi-BLAST at NCBI can find much more remote matches.

From a practical standpoint, Blat has several advantages over BLAST:

* speed (no queues, response in seconds) at the price of lesser homology depth
* the ability to submit a long list of simultaneous queries in fasta format
* five convenient output sort options
* a direct link into the UCSC browser
* alignment block details in natural genomic order
* an option to launch the alignment later as part of a custom track

Blat is commonly used to look up the location of a sequence in the genome or determine the exon structure of an mRNA, but expert users can run large batch jobs and make internal parameter sensitivity changes by installing command line Blat on their own Linux server.

Labels: bioinformatics