Blast output file only shows 500 lines -outfmt 6

Question

I had created databases of different sets of metagenome datasets - one with 6 runs, other with 48 runs, another with 100 runs, etc using the accession list for each of these datasets and makeblastdb command. Since I wanted to check the abundance of one specific 16S rRNA gene sequence, I ran a blastn command using this 16S sequence (F7) as the query against each of the created databases with a txt file (F7_droughtS.txt, F7_Dy.txt, so on) as the output. Ideally I should have got differently sized files with different number of OTU matches. I did get different files since the SRR ids were different for each database, but the results did not go beyond 500 lines for any database search. Can anyone explain why this is so?

Following is the command I used for blastn of: sequence.fasta against database firstdb :

blastn -query sequence.fasta -db firstdb -outfmt 6 -out output1.txt

Also ran the following to know the default number of lines : blastn -help -max_target_seqs

Number of database sequences to show one-line descriptions for

Not applicable for outfmt > 4 Default = 500' * Incompatible with: max_target_seqs -num_alignments <Integer, >=0> Number of database sequences to show alignments for Default = 250' * Incompatible with: max_target_seqs

Answer 1

I've reproduced the issue. The solution is to simply set -max_target_seqs to whatever number of hits you want. E.g. -max_target_seqs 1000 gives 1000 and so on ... The problem is specific to the -outfmt option and not default searches.

blastn version I'm using v2.12.0, Feb 8 2022

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Proof My database contains around 260000 fasta sequences.

makeblastdb -in mystuff.aln.0.fa   -parse_seqids -blastdb_version 5  -out test.db -title "test" -dbtype nucl 
blastn -query query.fas -db test.db -evalue 1e-6 -num_threads 4 -out blasthits.txt

Then wc blasthits.txt

>5000 hits

If we now use -outfmt 6, but remove the stringency of -evalue 1e-6 then ...

blastn -query query.fa -db test.db -outfmt 6 -num_threads 4 -out blasthits.txt

Now perform wc blasthits.txt

500

So the OP is correct, I didn't know -outfmt 6 restricts the output to 500.

If we now introduce the max_target_seqs 1000 parameter, suggested by @Laura then,

blastn -query query.fa -db test.db -outfmt 6 -max_target_seqs 1000 -num_threads 4 -out blasthits.txt

Then wc blasthits.txt

1000

If its 550 wc ... is 550 etc...

Thats it. Note in my blasts I usually parallelise across 4 processes i.e. -num_threads 4.