BlasTax—a user-friendly stand-alone tool to leverage the BLAST+ program for molecular taxonomy

We introduce BlasTax, a standalone software tool wrapping the BLAST algorithm for finding regions of similarity between nucleotide and amino acid sequences. BlasTax is designed to serve both general users of local BLAST who seek a simple and user-friendly interface, and taxonomists engaged in phylogenomics and museomics projects. BlasTax is driven by a graphical user interface that makes various BLAST functions accessible without separately installing the BLAST+ executables. It introduces several advanced modes to retrieve matching reads from FASTQ files of high-throughput sequencing of archival DNA from recent or historical collection material, to append matching sequences to existing alignments, or to decontaminate sequence data sets from sequences of non-target taxa. The program also comprises functions for the preparation of sequence files to be used as reference or query for BLAST, as well as utilities for sequence merging based on species labels, codon trimming and codon-aware multiple sequence alignments.