Use BLAST DB api

[czabriskie]

Instead of pulling entire blast database. Maybe we can use an API instead.

[OtimusOne]

Unfortunately is seem the NCBI API is no longer supported, they now offer documentation for running BLAST from your own cloud server.

I am not aware of other APIs that allow using BLAST on such large databases as UniRef90. MMseqs2 might be an alternative, but they also seems to have trouble with resources at the moment.

I had briefly tested MMseqs2 locally once before and I couldn't get nearly the same amount of hits as BLAST did, though I might not have used the proper arguments. There could also be other ways of computing the sequence conservation.

[czabriskie]

Yeah I feel this is something that would make the package a lot more user friendly. I think downloading these bits of data is what takes the longest and requires the most commitment