Organizing and updating whole genome BLAST searches with ReHAB

Abstract

In the current genomics era, protein and DNA sequence databases are continuously growing at an exponential rate. It has become increasingly important and useful to repeat similarity searches at frequent intervals, which then retrieve larger and larger sets of results. In addition, sequence similarity searches are now often performed with many sequences or even whole genomes. ReHAB (Recent Hits Acquired from Basic Local Alignment Search Tool [BLAST]) is a tool for tracking new protein hits in repeated PSI-BLAST searches. It is designed to simplify the analysis of large numbers of database matches and is therefore especially suited to comparative genomics. Results are presented in a user-friendly graphical interface with simple-to-navigate tables and new hits are indicated by highlighted text. In this paper, we describe the use of this software for organizing results from whole virus genome PSI-BLAST searches using a ReHAB database maintained at the Virus Bioinformatics Resource Centre.