FASTA
| Developer(s) | Pearson W.R. |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
36
|
| Operating system | UNIX, Linux, Mac, MS-Windows |
| Type | Bioinformatics tool |
| License | apache2.0 |
| Website | [1] |
FASTA is a DNA and protein sequence alignment software package first described (as FASTP) by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985. Its legacy is the FASTA format which is now ubiquitous in bioinformatics.
The original FASTP 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 (developed in 1988) 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.
FASTA is pronounced "fast A", and stands for "FAST-All", because it works with any alphabet, an extension of "FAST-P" (protein) and "FAST-N" (nucleotide) alignment.
The current FASTA package contains programs for protein:protein, DNA:DNA, protein:translated DNA (with frameshifts), and ordered or unordered peptide searches. Recent versions of the FASTA package include special translated search algorithms that correctly handle frameshift errors (which six-frame-translated searches do not handle very well) when comparing nucleotide to protein sequence data.
In addition to rapid heuristic search methods, the FASTA package provides SSEARCH, an implementation of the optimal Smith-Waterman algorithm.
A major focus of the package is the calculation of accurate similarity statistics, so that biologists can judge whether an alignment is likely to have occurred by chance, or whether it can be used to infer homology. The FASTA package is available from fasta.bioch.virginia.edu.
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