FASTA is a DNA and protein sequence alignment software package first described (as FASTP) by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985. Its legacy is the FASTA format which is now ubiquitous in bioinformatics.
The original FASTP program was designed for protein sequence similarity searching. FASTA added the ability to do DNA:DNA searches, translated protein:DNA searches, and also provided a more sophisticated shuffling program for evaluating statistical significance. There are several programs in this package that allow the alignment of protein sequences and DNA sequences..
FASTA is pronounced "fast A", and stands for "FAST-All", because it works with any alphabet, an extension of "FAST-P" (protein) and "FAST-N" (nucleotide) alignment.
The current FASTA package contains programs for protein:protein, DNA:DNA, protein:translated DNA (with frameshifts), and ordered or unordered peptide searches. Recent versions of the FASTA package include special translated search algorithms that correctly handle frameshift errors (which six-frame-translated searches do not handle very well) when comparing nucleotide to protein sequence data.
The Oera Linda Book is a manuscript written in Old Frisian. It purports to cover historical, mythological, and religious themes of remote antiquity between 2194 BC and AD 803.
The manuscript's author is not known with certainty, and it is hence unknown whether the intention was to produce a hoax, a parody or simply an exercise in poetic fantasy.
The manuscript first came to public awareness in the 1860s. In 1872, Jan Gerhardus Ottema published a Dutch translation and defended it as "genuine". Over the next few years there was a heated public controversy, but by 1879 it was universally recognized that the text was a recent composition. Nevertheless, a public controversy was revived in the context of 1930s Nazi occultism, and the book is still occasionally brought up in esotericism and "Atlantis" literature.
Goffe Jensma published a monograph on the manuscript in 2004, De gemaskerde god ("the masked god"), including a new translation and a discussion of the history of its reception. Jensma concludes that it was likely intended as a "hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians", as well as an "experiential exemplary exercise" by Dutch theologian and poet François Haverschmidt.