Schäffer AA, Aravind L, Madden TL, Shavirin S, Spouge JL, Wolf YI, et al. Improving the accuracy of PSI-BLAST protein database searches with composition-based statistics and other refinements. Nucleic Acids Res. 2001;29(14):2994–3005. The original Galaxy release did not include wrappers for the standalone NCBI BLAST or BLAST+ command line tools ( Altschul et al., 1990; Camacho et al., 2009). The use of BLAST was a priority for our own work, so we developed wrappers for the core BLAST+ tools. These were initially included in the main Galaxy repository before being migrated to the Galaxy Tool Shed. The BLAST+ tools have not been made available at the http://usegalaxy.org public server due to concerns over the resulting computational load (J Taylor, pers. comm., 2013), but are pre-installed on Galaxy CloudMan images, and can easily be added to a local Galaxy installation. Giant flares are poorly understood, but astronomers think they result from a sudden rearrangement of the magnetic field. One possibility is that the field high above the surface of the magnetar may become too twisted, suddenly releasing energy as it settles into a more stable configuration. Alternatively, a mechanical failure of the magnetar’s crust – a starquake – may trigger the sudden reconfiguration.

As sequencing costs have fallen, for many organisms it is now practical to sequence the entire genome when interested primarily in a single gene family. In this situation, BLAST might be used within Galaxy as follows:This article describes our NCBI BLAST+ [ 16] wrappers for Galaxy and associated tools and datatype definitions. Currently, these tools have not been made available at the public server hosted by the Galaxy Project owing to concerns over the resulting computational load (J Taylor, personal communication, 2013). However, they are available from the Galaxy Tool Shed for automated installation into a local Galaxy instance, or from our source code repository (hosted by GitHub, Inc., see Availability and requirements section), and are released under the open-source Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) licence. Applications Galaxy Tool Shed Repository “Filter sequences by ID”: https://toolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/view/peterjc/seq_filter_by_id/ Andrea Tiengo, Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia, Italy, and a team of astronomers have analysed the data to derive the most accurate distance to each of these dust clouds. “The first cloud it hit appears to be on the very edge of our galaxy, far from where galactic dust clouds are usually observed,” Andrea says. The team then inferred the properties of the dust grains in the clouds because the X-rays are scattered according to the size, shape and composition of the dust.

The light following the burst, called the afterglow emission, also exhibited unusual features. Fermi detected high-energy gamma rays starting 1.5 hours post-burst and lasting more than 2 hours. These gamma rays reached energies of up to 1 billion electron volts. (Visible light’s energy measures between about 2 and 3 electron volts, for comparison.)The April 15 flare proves that these events constitute their own class of GRBs. Eric Burns, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, led a study investigating additional suspects using data from numerous missions. The findings will appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Bursts near the galaxy M81 in 2005 and the Andromeda galaxy (M31) in 2007 had already been suggested to be giant flares, and the team additionally identified a flare in M83, also seen in 2007 but newly reported. Add to these the giant flare from 1979 and those observed in our Milky Way in 1998 and 2004. This large amount of data from entirely different instruments is now being brought together to understand how the original explosion took place, and how the radiation has interacted with other matter on its journey through space.