Tachyon search speeds up retrieval of similar sequences by several orders of magnitude.

The usage of current sequence search tools becomes increasingly slower as databases of protein sequences continue to grow exponentially. Tachyon, a new algorithm that identifies closely related protein sequences ~200 times faster than standard BLAST, circumvents this limitation with a reduced database and oligopeptide matching heuristic.The tool is publicly accessible as a webserver at http://tachyon.bii.a-star.edu.sg and can also be accessed programmatically through SOAP.