We’ve just released  a new version (1.6.0) of Magic-BLAST, the BLAST-based next-gen alignment tool, with these improvements:

• Usage reporting — you can help improve Magic-BLAST by sharing limited information about your search. The BLAST User Manual has details on the information collected, how it is used, and how to opt-out.
• Magic BLAST can access NCBI SRA next-gen reads from the cloud when  you use the -sra or -sra_batch options.  See the Magic-BLAST cookbook for more details.
• NCBI taxonomy IDs are reported in SAM output if they are present in the target BLAST database.
• You can get unaligned reads reported separately from the aligned ones by using the -out_unaligned <file name> option.  You can also select the format ( SAM, tabular, or FASTA) with the -unaligned_fmt option. The default format is the same as one for the main report .

The version 1.6.0 executables are available from the NCBI FTP site.  See the release notes , the NCBI GitHub site , and the Magic-BLAST publication for more information.

• What's New