NCBI BLAST + integrated into Galaxy

Background The NCBI BLAST suite has become ubiquitous in modern molecular biology, used for small tasks like checking capillary sequencing results of single PCR products through to genome annotation or even larger scale pan-genome analyses. For early adopters of the Galaxy web-based biomedical data analysis platform, integrating BLAST was a natural step for sequence comparison workflows. Findings The command line NCBI BLAST+ tool suite was wrapped for use within Galaxy, defining appropriate datatypes as needed, with the goal of making common BLAST tasks easy, and advanced tasks possible. Conclusions This effort has been come an informal international collaborative effort, and is deployed and used on Galaxy servers worldwide. Several example use-cases are described herein.