Exactly, and that could change the interpretation of their findings completely. I haven’t checked their credentials, but I would be surprised if any of the authors has a background in bioinformatics or computational biology.

BLAST is used on a daily basis by a lot of scientists (its paper is among the most cited of all time), but many of them lack the theoretical knowledge to analyze in depth their results. This paper doesn’t have a single line about methodological details, such as the parameters used in their BLAST runs. The authors don’t even refer to P- or E-values either, despite being prominently displayed on the output table of every run!