[Bioperl-l] Problem with parsing blast results

[Jacob Bunk Nielsen]

Hi

anastsia shapiro <uni.anastasia at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm running a script that should parse a blast results, using searchIO.
>
> Sometimes the script work fines, however sometimes it stops, and I receive
> the following error.
>
> ------------- EXCEPTION -------------
> MSG: no data for midline Query
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> STACK Bio::SearchIO::blast::next_result C:/Perl64/site/lib/Bio\SearchIO\
> blast.pm:1805
> STACK toplevel
> D:\D\uni-anastasia\project\scripts\ParsingBlastResults\ParsingBlastResults.pl:36
> -------------------------------------
> While the blast results files were received as a result of running the
> following blast command:
> blastn -task blastn -db xxxxxxxxx.txt -evalue 1e-10 -perc_identity 80 -dust
> no -num_descriptions 0  -query xxxxx.txt -out results.txt -strand plus

I don't know why this exact problem arises, but I think you should
consider using an output format that is better machine parseable, like
the XML format.

You specify XML as output format of blastn by using -m 7. When reading
the result with Bioperl you must specify =>'blastxml' for Bio::SearchIO.

That way I think you are likely to see a lot fewer problems regarding
the parsing of blast output.

If the above doesn't solve the problem you better show us the code that
fails.

Best regards

Jacob