On Monday 28th March 2011 the WSWUBlast service, used by these clients, was decommissioned and replaced by the following services:

• WU-BLAST (REST)
• WU-BLAST (SOAP)

The service documentation and clients below are historical and provided solely for reference purposes.

WU-BLAST (Washington University Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) Version 2.0 is used to compare a sequence with those contained in nucleotide and protein databases by aligning the sequence with previously characterized genes. The emphasis of this tool is to find regions of sequence similarity, which will yield functional and evolutionary clues about the structure and function of this novel sequence. Regions of similarity detected via this type of alignment tool can be either local, where the region of similarity is based in 1 location, or global, where regions of similarity can be detected across otherwise unrelated genetic code.

For more information about this tool see:

• EBI Tools:
  • WU-BLAST
  • Specialist domain WU-BLAST services:
    • ASD WU-BLAST
    • Parasite Genomes WU-BLAST
  • WU-BLAST Help
• WU-BLAST website

For details of the service used by these clients see WSWUBlast.

The Microsoft .NET runtime is already installed on most MS Windows systems. The Microsoft .NET runtime is available via Microsoft Update or as a download (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/).

For MacOS X, Linux and other non-Windows systems see Mono or DotGNU.

Download the C# client:

• Executable: wswublast.exe
• Source code: wswublast.cs

Run without arguments to get a usage summary:

wswublast.exe

Download and unzip the library files lib-1.4.zip and add the jars to the Java classpath.

Download the Java client:

• Executable: WSWUBlast.jar
• Source code: WSWUBlastClient.java

To get usage information run the client without arguments:

java -Djava.ext.dirs=lib -jar WSWUBlast.jar

A basic GUI client is also available illustrating the use of the service meta-data:

• Executable: WSWUBlastGUI.jar
• Source code: WSWUBlastGuiClient.java

To run the Perl client you need to install SOAP::Lite. SOAP::Lite is a collection of Perl modules which provides a simple and lightweight interface to SOAP both on client and server side. This client requires SOAP::Lite version 0.60.

Download the Perl client: wublast.pl

To get usage information run without arguments:

perl wublast.pl

Workflow engines such as Taverna and Triana offer a simple way of combining individual web services into complex applications.

A basic workflow showing how to use WSWUBlast can be found on myExperiment.