For several years, we have had a working BackBLAST v2 in alpha that was only available on the develop branch. Given that BackBLAST is not currently under active development, we have decided to push this version (with a few improvements) to main and to release it in beta for greater visibility.
This first beta release of v2.0.0 includes several major updates and feature changes compared to v1 of BackBLAST, including:
- The tool runs as a snakemake pipeline instead of a set of individual commands. This allows large numbers of genomes to be processed simultaneously.
- A single cli,
backblast, can be used to access and run the pipeline or individual utilities. - Installation is semi-automated via conda.
- In automating BackBLAST v2, we deprecated some functionality of v1, like identifying and visualizing gene clusters. See an old v1 release of you would still like to use this code.
Full Changelog (compared to the last v2 alpha version):
v2.0.0-alpha7...v2.0.0-beta1
Full Changelog (compared to v1.1):
v1.1...v2.0.0-beta1
We might continue development on BackBLAST to make a full v2.0.0 release someday, but for now, we hope these beta releases are helpful to the broader community. We hope to continue to provide updates from time to time.