Why is blast's qcovs/qcovus an integer? what's the logic behind it?

Question

[iddo.nadav]

Why is blast's qcovs/qcovus an integer? what's the logic behind it? Query coverage definitely doesn't have to be a round number, what's the logic of rounding in to the nearest integer by default? any way to change this behavior and get the exact value as a float? Thanks, Iddo

[GenoMax]

You should send this in to blast support desk at NCBI since it will likely need internal knowledge of code to know how these values are calculated. There is an old thread but that likely refers to legacy blast : BLAST definition and difference between 'qcovs' and 'qcovhsp'

Please post the answer here once you hear back from the support.

[iddo.nadav]

wrote them.. waiting for a response

[GenoMax]

Be patient. It can take a few days to hear back from them but they do respond.

Answer 1

[iddo.nadav]

[e-mail] actually answered quite quickly and said that until now they didn't think users needed qcovs to be accurate and that rounding it off was accurate enough. They said they will try to add the option for this to be an accurate float instead of a rounded integer in the next version 2.14.0 in about 6 months

[Istvan Albert]

thanks for following up here, I kind of suspected the same answer, sounds like an ill-conceived "convenience" feature