Blast Database format specification
"Chris Dunnigan" <[email protected]> Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:25:36 -0500
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.biology.informatics.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone here knew, or could point me to a location which describes the database format produced by formatdb. The only reference I seem to have found is http://blast.wustl.edu/blast/ncbi20ntfmt.html . While I have based some code on reading the binary blast databases using this peudo code provided, I feel it is not exactly correct. First I cannot see a way to determine the end of a sequence. The sequence file offsets provide the starting points of all the sequences, but there can be empty 2 bit pairs at the end, and how does one determine if they are adenine bases or just empty. The above link says that there should be a "magic" byte to signify the end of the sequence but have not found this to be the case. Anyway I was wondering if anyone could give a better description of the binary format used, or point me to a place that might be helpful. Thank you!! Chris