The ITS regions (ITS1 and ITS2) are widely used for biomolecular identification of fungi. Nowadays, there are two main databases, each with their own sequence processing platform: UNITE and NCBI. The most developed and widely used software is BLAST. However, BLAST works on the NCBI database by default, whereas UNITE has become a reference when it comes to ITS sequence taxonomic assignment. Moreover, it has become very clear today, in the global context, that researchers need local and open resources, not subject to a political agenda.
FunBLAST provides a way to blast a large number of ITS sequences against the UNITE database (or NCBI "from type material" database optionnaly), in the style of the NCBI BLASTn web page, with local and updatable database files and a locally hosted BLAST algorithm.
FunBLAST is designed to run BLASTn on a large number of ITS fungal sequences gathered in a FASTA file (.fas), using ITS databases such as UNITE, INSD or NCBI and produce JSON, CSV and HTML files with results.
It work in three steps :
Check the number and the size of input files. It check the number of nucleotides to alocate ressources accordingly (CPU, RAM, and time);
It set a SLURM session with ressources and launch a BLAST on the specified database, inside a dedicated container;
It use the BLAST output to create a CSV file and a HTML page.