In article <cupton-2707991459320001 at hera.bioc.uvic.ca>,
cupton at uvic.ca (Chris Upton) writes:
> Is there a simple way to send off 200 blast searches to NCBI or other
> server and have them return the results in HTML or text format?
I see two solutions:
- write a Web client which will automatize the task. If you like Perl,
see "Web client programming with Perl" by Clinton Wong (O'Reilly), which
is a good book and has similar examples. For the HTMl translation, your
program can then call any translator like Html4blast
<ftp://ftp.pasteur.fr/pub/GenSoft/unix/alignment/Blast_tools/Html4blast/>
- install Blast on your machine. It is a bit painful but possible. The real
problem is not the program but the banks. If you want to maintain an
uptodate copy of Genbank, it is painful. Well, if you want, you have
packages of Blast for Debian
<http://www.pasteur.fr/units/sis/debian/biology-en.html> and RedHat
<http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/Applications_Bioinformatics.html>. This
solution will allow you to script at will and to run your 200 searches
very easily.