NCBI BLAST databases

The NCBI databases are downloaded every Sunday to a directory with that date. The file /datasets/bio/ncbi-db/.ncbirc is then updated to point to the new copy once the download has been verified. This allows running jobs to have a consistent database throughout the run.

Note that other tools that can use the NCBI database but do not read this configuration file can use the output of blastdb_path to find the current copy, as shown in the following example:

module load blast-plus/2.13.0+py3.8.12 diamond/2.0.15+py2.7.18
NR=$(blastdb_path -db nr -dbtype prot)
diamond blastp --db "$NR" -q query.fasta -o matches.tsv