A new more efficient version of BLAST+ 2.12.o is available now [1]. This version provides more efficient multithreaded searches.

This new version of BLAST supports threading by a query that can be proved more efficient in certain situations. This feature is advantageous in situations when the queries are large in number with a small database, or when the search is limited by taxid or GI list. After taking many sequences as queries, the ‘threading by query’ option assigns a thread to them that performs the entire search and formatting of results within that thread [1]. It preserves the order of query in the results. To enable this option, use “-mt_mode 1” by providing a value of 1.

Other new features include:

• the “-showall pretty” option is now supported by update_blastdb.pl for all databases hosted by NCBI.
• less virtual memory for smaller databases by maskeblastdb.
• makeprofiledb creates multiple volumes for a CDD database allowing RPSBLAST to handle a larger number of records.

BLAST+2.12.0 has also fixed phiblast core dump and memory leak in setup procedures bugs.

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References

1. https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2021/07/09/blast-2-12-0/