Lee Marianne M, Chan Michael K, Bundschuh Ralf
The Ohio State Biophysics Program, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1117, USA.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2009 Jul;37(Web Server issue):W53-6. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkp301. Epub 2009 May 8.
A SIB-BLAST web server (http://sib-blast.osc.edu) has been established for investigators to use the SimpleIsBeautiful (SIB) algorithm for sequence-based homology detection. SIB was developed to overcome the model corruption frequently observed in the later iterations of PSI-BLAST searches. The algorithm compares resultant hits from the second iteration to the final iteration of a PSI-BLAST search, calculates the figure of merit for each 'overlapped' hit and re-ranks the hits according to their figure of merit. By validating hits generated from the last profile against hits from the first profile when the model is least corrupted, the true and false positives are better delineated, which in turn, improves the accuracy of iterative PSI-BLAST searches. Notably, this improvement to PSI-BLAST comes at minimal computational cost as SIB-BLAST utilizes existing results already produced in a PSI-BLAST search.
