Our Galaxy instance has a number of Blast databases built-in. Over the past few years we updated these once a year, usually in august. While this provided excellent stability and reliability of results, users found it lacking in the freshness of those results.
Now, every two weeks all of our blast databases are updated.
You will notice that many databases are now prefixed with the phrase “[Permanent]“. These blast databases will be kept permanently to ensure perfect reproducibility and good science. If you need results that are to be used in a paper, you must use these databases so you can safely point to the results in our Galaxy instance and people can reproduce those results exactly.
The other databases without the permanent prefix, will exist for some time before being removed. We make no guarantees on their longevity other than they will last at least until the next time the databases are updated.
At the start of every quarter of the year, the first database download is marked as a “permanent” download.