Bioinformatics Tutorials & Lessons: using BLAST to search for similarities

Bioinformatics Tutorials & Lessons: using BLAST to search for similarities

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is an algorithm or program that can identify similar (Nucleic Acid or Amino Acid) sequences to a query sequence.

Lets say that you have sequenced recently a gene from the mouse genome and you have nothing about this gene except its sequence, here comes the role of BLAST, it searches databases for similar sequences to yours, by this you will find informations about similar sequences to yours like (Gene or protein Family, Organism, related sequences, function...etc), this will help you to identify your sequence.

You can read this wikipedia article to know more about BLAST from HERE


You can read the BLAST help page from HERE or the Documentation from HERE.


This is a video tutorial that demonstrates how to use BLAST to search for similar protein sequences to my sequence.
(I used BLAST of SwissProt database)



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