The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is one of the most widely used bioinformatics tools. The widespread impact of BLAST is reflected in over 53,000 citations that this software has received in the past two decades, and the use of the word blast as a verb referring to biological sequence comparison. Any improvement in the execution speed of BLAST would be of great importance in the practice of bioinformatics, and facilitate coping with ever increasing sizes of biomolecular databases.