Faster. More Accurate. That Simple.
BLAT is a bioinformatics software a tool which performs rapid mRNA/DNA and cross-species protein alignments. BLAT is more accurate and 500 times faster than popular existing tools for mRNA/DNA alignments and 50 times faster for protein alignments at sensitivity settings typically used when comparing vertebrate sequences. (Source: Kent, W.J. 2002. BLAT -- The BLAST-Like Alignment Tool. Genome Research 4: 656-664.)
BLAT is not BLAST. DNA BLAT works by keeping an index of the entire genome (but not the genome itself) in memory. Since the index takes up a bit less than a gigabyte of RAM, BLAT can deliver high performance on a reasonably priced Linux box.
BLAST Farm Headaches Got You Down?
BLAST farm thrashing and crashing? Nodes down and out of sync? Systems administrators frazzled and grumpy? Still waiting after a month for all of those ESTs to align and now there's a new genome assembly? Server hard disk filled yet again?
BLAT will do in a day what BLAST will do in a month, and in many cases a single CPU will handle the load. The output is small and easy to parse. Splice sites are found without exon bleed-over. Give your staff and your server a rest and switch to BLAT today.