BLAST VIDEO OF MASSIVE EXPLOSION IN SOUTHERN

BLAST VIDEO OF MASSIVE EXPLOSION IN SOUTHERN


BLAST
Developer(s)
Altschul SF
Gish W
Miller W
Myers EW
Lipman DJ
NCBI
Stable release
2.7.1+ / 18 October 2017; 13 months ago
Operating system UNIX, Linux, Mac, MS-Windows
Type Bioinformatics tool
License Public domain
Website blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
In bioinformatics, BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of proteins or the nucleotides of DNA and/or RNA sequences. A BLAST search enables a researcher to compare a query sequence with a library or database of sequences, and identify library sequences that resemble the query sequence above a certain threshold.

Different types of BLASTs are available according to the query sequences. For example, following the discovery of a previously unknown gene in the mouse, a scientist will typically perform a BLAST search of the human genome to see if humans carry a similar gene; BLAST will identify sequences in the human genome that resemble the mouse gene based on similarity of sequence. The BLAST algorithm and program were designed by Stephen Altschul, Warren Gish, Webb Miller, Eugene Myers, and David J. Lipman at the National Institutes of Health and was published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1990 and cited over 50,000 times.[1]BLAST is one of the most widely used bioinformatics programs for sequence searching.[2] It addresses a fundamental problem in bioinformatics research. The heuristic algorithm it uses is much faster than other approaches, such as calculating an optimal alignment. This emphasis on speed is vital to making the algorithm practical on the huge genome databases currently available, although subsequent algorithms can be even faster.

Before BLAST, FASTA was developed by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson in 1985.[3]

Before fast algorithms such as BLAST and FASTA were developed, doing database searches for protein or nucleic sequences was very time consuming because a full alignment procedure (e.g., the Smith–Waterman algorithm) was used.

While BLAST is faster than any Smith-Waterman implementation for most cases, it cannot "guarantee the optimal alignments of the query and database sequences" as Smith-Waterman algorithm does. The optimality of Smith-Waterman "ensured the best performance on accuracy and the most precise results" at the expense of time and computer power.

BLAST is more time-efficient than FASTA by searching only for the more significant patterns in the sequences, yet with comparative sensitivity. This could be further realized by understanding the algorithm of BLAST introduced below.

Examples of other questions that researchers use BLAST to answer are:

Which bacterial species have a protein that is related in lineage to a certain protein with known amino-acid sequence
What other genes encode proteins that exhibit structures or motifs such as ones that have just been determined
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