Bioinformatics Tools

BLAST Description and Tutorials

BLAST - the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/) searches for sequences (nucleotide or protein) in a given database that are similar to a given sequence.  It was developed by Altschul and coworkers at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.   Further information about BLAST can be reached from the server page listed above.  The two BLAST programs listed below are the ones used in the game.

• Standard nucleotide-nucleotide BLAST [blastn] -  The blastn program is used to compare an input nucleotide sequence to the entries in a nucleotide sequence database.  
• Standard protein-protein BLAST [blastp] - The blastp program is used to compare an input amino acid sequence to the entries in an amino acid database.

BLAST Tutorials

• The Basics
• More Advanced Information

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