This BLAST AMI is a very exciting development as it allows users to perform sequence similarity searches without restriction they might encounter at a public website and without the work of setting up stand-alone BLAST. The AMI includes a FUSE client that automatically downloads the most popular BLAST databases from the NCBI, and users can still upload their own custom databases. The AMI allows users to run stand-alone searches with the BLAST+ applications, submit searches through a subset of the NCBI-BLAST URL API, and perform searches with a simplified webpage.