A poor man's blastx-High-throughput metagenomic protein database search using pauda

Abstract

Summary: In the context of metagenomics, we introduce a new approach to protein database search called PAUDA, which runs ∼10 000 times faster than BLASTX, while achieving about one-third of the assignment rate of reads to KEGG orthology groups, and producing gene and taxon abundance profiles that are highly correlated to those obtained with BLASTX. PAUDA requires <80 CPU hours to analyze a dataset of 246 million Illumina DNA reads from permafrost soil for which a previous BLASTX analysis (on a subset of 176 million reads) reportedly required 800 000 CPU hours, leading to the same clustering of samples by functional profiles. © 2013 The Author(s).