BLAST is fast - but imprecise!
BLAST gives you some of the answers. The Cube gives you all of them. When BLASTing you can potentially miss up to 50% of what you are searching for. If you want all the answers - and still want fast searches - you can improve the quality of your research by using hardware-accelerated Smith-Waterman on the Cube. Download our white paper below to read what this is about.
Download white paper
If you're interested in the white paper, you can obtain it by clicking the "download" button below - and filling in the form. Once you have submitted the form, you will receive an email, giving you access to the white paper.
White paper excerpt
On an overall level, you can say that:
- BLAST is the better in the explorative phases of the research, and Smith Waterman is the better in the late stages of the research, where absolutely correct results are more important than estimates.
- If you have query sequence data with too many of inherent errors, BLAST searches would often be so imprecise that the results are wrong or misleading.
The Cube significantly changes this picture by allowing database searches at a high quality level within reasonable execution times: The Cube runs Smith Waterman up to 125 times faster than a 3 GHz desktop computer, and acceptably close to the speed of BLAST. Smith Waterman searches taking 14 hours on the desktop are thus reduced to around 7 minutes on the Cube.
