Extract text from sequence alignments (BLAST)
To convert BLAST alignments to another format, you need NCBI BLAST or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Bioinformatics Data File" file type, you need software like NCBI BLAST or a similar tool.
The .BLAST file extension contains sequence alignment search results generated by the NCBI BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) algorithm. These files store critical bioinformatics data, mapping queried nucleotide or protein sequences against vast biological databases to find regions of local similarity.
Standard online converters routinely fail to process .BLAST files. Depending on the export parameters, the file might contain raw plain text, pairwise alignments, or structured XML data. The primary disadvantage of this format is its highly specialized nature. Files often exceed 100MB for large genomic queries, and extracting tabular data or visualizing the alignments requires specialized bioinformatics software like UGENE or programmatic parsing via BioPython. Sharing raw .BLAST output with non-technical stakeholders or trying to open it in standard office software usually results in unreadable, formatting-broken text walls.
To make this data useful outside of academic pipelines, researchers frequently need to convert .BLAST to CSV, XML, or TXT to import the hit tables into spreadsheets. Visualizations are often exported to PDF or PNG.
Because this is a niche data format, it is difficult to open or convert without the original bioinformatics environment. Just drag and drop your file on convert.guru to identify the format, inspect the internal content, and convert it when possible. If our analysis detects supported underlying plain-text or tabular data, viewing or extraction is fast and secure.
Convert.Guru analyzes your BLAST file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted DICTIONARY, DEAD and EXE2 files.
If you want to convert BLAST file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use NCBI BLAST or similar software from the "Sequence Alignment Search Results" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to BLAST, try NCBI BLAST or another comparable tool in the "Sequence Alignment Search Results" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our BLAST converter.