BlastX Database error: No alias or index file found for protein database

Question

[marongiu.luigi]

Hello,

I downloaded the indices for the nr database with wget ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/db/FASTA/nr.gz in order to run blastX locally. I put the files in a directory refDir, the nucleic acid sequence of interest in qFile and launched blastx with

blastx -db $refDir -num_threads 14 -max_target_seqs 10 -outfmt  '6 qseqid sseqid evalue bitscore sgi sacc staxids sscinames' -query $qFile

but I got:

BLAST Database error: No alias or index file found for protein database [<path to refDir>] in search path [<path to refDir>::]

What am I missing? Thanks

[massa.kassa.sc3na]

Removed by the author.

[marongiu.luigi]

You are right, actually I did not use the FASTA nr.gz (that was another thread I opened and pasted here) but the indices from ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/blast/db/

Answer 1

[lieven.sterck]

you need to also specify the DB name, not only the path to it.

should be something like: -db $refDir/DB_name

[marongiu.luigi]

Thank you, that was it!