FASTA
Sign in to saveFASTA is a DNA and protein sequence alignment software package first described by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985. Its legacy is the FASTA format which is now ubiquitous in bioinformatics.
Key facts
- Software.name
- FASTA
- Software.latest_release_version
- 36
- Software.genre
- Bioinformatics
- Software.license
- apache2.0
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Article
6 sectionsContents
- History
- Uses
- Search method
- Statistical significance
- See also
- References
FASTA is a DNA and protein sequence alignment software package first described by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985. Its legacy is the FASTA format which is now ubiquitous in bioinformatics.
== History == The original FASTA program was designed for protein sequence similarity searching. Because of the exponentially expanding genetic information and the limited speed and memory of computers in the 1980s heuristic methods were introduced aligning a query sequence to entire data-bases. FASTA, published in 1987, added the ability to do DNA:DNA searches, translated protein:DNA searches, and also provided a more sophisticated shuffling program for evaluating statistical significance. There are several programs in this package that allow the alignment of protein sequences and DNA sequences. Nowadays, increased computer performance makes it possible to perform searches for local alignment detection in a database using the Smith–Waterman algorithm.