Plugin error from feature-classifier: BLAST6 file is empty.

Hi, I'm trying to build updated databases for 18S, COI and 12S (mifish).

Once I have my fasta file with the sequences and the taxonomy tsv files i use qiime commands to convert into qza files:

qiime tools import --type 'FeatureData[Sequence]' --input-path xxx.fasta --input-format DNAFASTAFormat --output-path xxx.qza
qiime tools import --type 'FeatureData[Taxonomy]' --input-format HeaderlessTSVTaxonomyFormat --input-path** xxx.tsv --output-path xxx.qza**

I then use the feature classifier to assign taxonomies:
qiime feature-classifier classify-consensus-blast
--i-query mifish_rep-seqs.qza
--i-reference-reads references.12s.miyaSeqs.qza
--i-reference-taxonomy references.12s.miyaTaxonomy.qza
--p-perc-identity 0.97
--output-dir references.12s.miyaTaxonomy97

But I always get an error for any new database I try:
Plugin error from feature-classifier:

BLAST6 file is empty.

Could you please help me out? This used to work really well, maybe 3-4 years ago but not anymore.
Thank you.
Vera

Hello @cefas23,

Could rerun with the --verbose flag and post the output? It seems like maybe it's erroring because there were no hits, thus an empty blast6 file.

Hello

I've checked and that might be the reason. thanks.
another error with a different data and database shows up.
When I run :
qiime feature-classifier classify-consensus-blast
--i-query nis_trimmed_ASVs/nis_rep-seqs.qza
--i-reference-reads COIsequence23.qza
--i-reference-taxonomy COItaxonomy23.qza
--p-perc-identity 0.97
--output-dir nis_COItaxonomy97/
--verbose

I get this error:
(1/1) Invalid value for '--i-reference-reads': COIsequence23.qza was created
by 'QIIME 2023.5.1'. The currently installed framework cannot interpret
archive version '6'.

could you please advice?
Thank you.

Hello @cefas23,

It looks like COIsequence23.qza was generated with qiime 2023.5, which introduced a new archive version, but you're using something lower than 2023.5. If you upgrade to 2023.5 or generate COIsequence23.qza with <2023.5, this issue should go away.

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