BLAT is a bioinformatics software tool which performs rapid mRNA/DNAand cross-species protein alignments. BLAT is more accurate and 500times faster than popular existing tools for mRNA/DNA alignments and 50times faster for protein alignments at sensitivity settings typicallyused when comparing vertebrate sequences. (Source: Kent, W.J. 2002. BLAT-- The BLAST-Like Alignment Tool. Genome Research 4: 656-664.http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/gr.229202)BLAT is not BLAST. DNA BLAT works by keeping an index of the entiregenome (but not the genome itself) in memory. Since the index takes up abit less than a gigabyte of RAM, BLAT can deliver high performance on areasonably priced Linux box.