BLAST-mining software: bloutminer
I have put some “new” software online. I have had this piece of code lying around for some time but never got to upload it as I didn’t view it as “finished”. It is still not finished, but I would nevertheless like to share it with a wider audience. So, today I introduce bloutminer – the BLAST output mining script I have been using lately. bloutminer allows you to specify e.g. an E-value cutoff, a length cutoff and a percent identity cutoff, and extract a list of the hits satisfying these cutoffs. It takes table output (blastall option -m 8 ) as input. This is the software I used for the BLAST visualisation I have discussed earlier.
I normally use an E-value cutoff of 10 for my BLAST searches, and then extracts hits with bloutminer, allowing me to change the cutoffs at a later stage without redoing the whole BLAST search. You can also “pool” sequences into groups, based on their sequence tags. bloutminer is work in progress, and may contain nasty bugs. It can be found on the Software page. Please improve it at will.