A review: FPGA based word matching stage of BLASTN

Molecular Biologists use Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) as one of the most popular sequences analysis tool. BLAST is a design used to efficiently find similar regions between the two sequences that have biological significance. As the size of genome sequences is increasing rapidly, the computation time of BLAST is continuously increasing to perform a complete genomic database search. Hence there is a need to accelerate this search process. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to scan the genomic sequence databases of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) using field programmable gate array (FPGA) based hardware. To accelerate the word matching stage of BLASTN, specifically designed for DNA sequences, and to derive its efficient architecture, a reconfigurable architecture is proposed.