Hi guys,

another error appeared after we installed NCBI BLAST + to our local Galaxy instance and wanted to test it.

After uploading some testdata to our history we tried to run blastn on it and got the following error:

Fatal error: Matched on Error:

Error: NCBI C++ Exception:

    "/opt/galaxy/galaxy-dist/database/tmp/tmphx2DHp/ncbi-blast-2.2.26+-src/c++/src/corelib/ncbiobj.cpp", line 689: Critical: ncbi::CObject::ThrowNullPointerException() - Attempt to access NULL pointer.

With some testing around we figure out the problem:

./blastn -query ~/test.fasta -db nt -task blastn -evalue 0.001 -out ~/out2.txt -outfmt "6 std sallseqid score nident positive gaps ppos qframe sframe qseq sseq qlen slen" -num_threads 8

Doesn’t work until we replaced the “num_threads 8” like it is written in the original “ncbi_blastn_wrapper.xml” with “num_threads 1”  

Editing the .xml also solved the problem within the galaxy surface.

Now my question is, is there any other workaround without editing the” ncbi_blastn_wrapper.xml”?

Searching in the documentation and the mailing list, I did not find anything about this.

We believe this could be of common interest. It would be great if anybody could comment on this. 

Thanks a lot, Thomas