FASTA is a DNA an Protein sequence alignment software package first described (as FASTP) by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985 in the article Rapid and sensitive protein similarity searches. The original FASTP program was designed for protein sequence similarity searching. FASTA, described in 1988 (Improved Tools for Biological Sequence Comparison) 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-Aye", and stands for "FAST-All", because it works with any alphabet, an extension of "FAST-P" (protein) and "FAST-N" (nucleotide) alignment.