On June 2024, NCBI released a new version of BLAST (2.16.0). NCBI didn’t release an ARM binary so far, it is not available at the FTP site nor the Docker images. Toyoko released a Docker image with the ARM version at https://hub.docker.com/r/dnalinux/blast-static.
To pull the ARM version of BLAST (provided that you are in an ARM system):
docker pull dnalinux/blast-static
Here are some the the improvements on BLAST 2.16.0:
- psiblast traceback now takes advantage of multiple threads, improving runtime by 3%-6%.
- The default word threshold for the blastp-fast and blastx-fast was raised from 19.3 to 20, yielding a runtime improvement of 4% without significant loss of sensitivity (less than 3%).
- A warning (as opposed to an error) will be reported if the NCBI taxonomy IDs provided to the negative_taxid* command line options are not found in the database.
- Improved update_blastdb.pl error handling on failure to download files.
- Added documentation on how to check BLASTDB files for data corruption.
- Updated build instructions to include information about build time dependencies.
- Reduced the size of the BLAST+ docker image by about 50%.
You can read the full release notes here.