PLAST is a fast, accurate and NGS scalable bank-to-bank sequence similarity search tool providing significant accelerations of seeds-based heuristic comparison methods, such as the Blast suite of algorithms.

Relying on unique software architecture, PLAST takes full advantage of recent multi-core personal computers without requiring any additional hardware devices.

PLAST stands for Parallel Local Sequence Alignment Search Tool and is was published in BMC Bioinformatics.

PLAST is a general purpose sequence comparison tool providing the following benefits:

• PLAST is a high-performance sequence comparison tool designed to compare two sets of sequences (query vs. reference),
• Reduces the processing time of sequences comparisons while providing highest quality results,
• Contains a fully integrated data filtering engine capable of selecting relevant hits with user-defined criteria (E-Value, identity, coverage, alignment length, etc.),
• Does not require any additional hardware, since it is a software solution. It is easy to install, cost-effective, takes full advantage of multi-core processors and uses a small RAM footprint,
• Ready to be used on desktop computer, cluster, cloud as well as within distributed system running Hadoop.

Once upon a time was KLAST…