[Bioperl-l] Determining strand orientation from bl2seq report

[Dave Arenillas]

I'm trying to figure out if there is any way to determine the strand 
orientation (Plus / Plus or Plus / Minus) of an HSP from the blast report 
created by running bl2seq.

ex.
my @params = ('program' => 'blastn',
                'outfile' => "$BlastFile");
my $factory = Bio::Tools::Run::StandAloneBlast->new(@params);
my $report = $factory->bl2seq($seq1, $seq2);

while (my $hsp = $report->next_feature) {
	#
	# get orientation info from $hsp???
	#
}

Apparently Bio::Tools::BPlite::HSP objects have no methods to return this 
information. I (incorrectly) assumed that I could test
$hsp->hit->start > $hsp->hit->end
but start is always less than end even for Plus / Minus orientation.

I then attempted to create a SearchIO object and use this to parse the blast 
report, for ex.
my $searchio = new Bio::SearchIO( -format => 'blast',
                        -file   => "$BlastFile" );

while (my $result = $searchio->next_result) {
	#
	# Results in the error below
	#
        while (my $hit = $result->next_hit) {
                while (my $hsp = $hit->next_hsp) {
		}
	}
}

However, this produced the following error:
 
------------ EXCEPTION  -------------
MSG: no data for midline Lambda     K      H
STACK Bio::SearchIO::blast::next_result 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Bio/SearchIO/blast.pm:566

Is the report produced by bl2seq some kind of simplified blast report which 
SearchIO cannot parse? Is there any other way of determining HSP strand 
orientation?

Thanks,
Dave