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NCBI BLAST databases

The NCBI databases are downloaded every Sunday to a directory with that date. The file /datasets/bio/ncbi-db/.ncbirc is then updated to point to the new copy once the download has been verified. This allows running jobs to have a consistent database throughout the run.

Note that other tools that can use the NCBI database but do not read this configuration file can use the output of blastdb_path to find the current copy, as shown in the following example:

module load blast-plus/2.14.1 diamond/2.1.10
NR=$(blastdb_path -db nr -dbtype prot)
diamond blastp --db "$NR" -q query.fasta -o matches.tsv
Path:/datasets/bio/ncbi-db/
URL:https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/db/
Downloaded:weekly
Cite:https://support.nlm.nih.gov/knowledgebase/article/KA-03391/en-us
Variant:
    Last modified: Friday, August 22, 2025 at 3:06 AM. See the commit on GitLab.
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