Are Alignment Lengths Reported In Ncbi Blast+ Results Counting Nucleotides Or Amino Acids?

Question

[bedeabc]

Very simply, what are the units of the alignment length reported by BLASTX and BLASTP? The units of length are not listed in the output column headings (-outfmt 7) and I have found nothing in the O'Reilly BLAST manual.

It is specifically BLASTX (translated nucleotide query vs protein database) and BLASTP (protein vs protein) for which I need to know this information.

Answer 1

[bedeabc]

Ok, I'm now fairly confident that it's amino acids for both BLASTX and BLASTP. Anyone willing to confirm this?