BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool)
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BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is a popular bioinformatics program used for sequence alignment and similarity searching. It is a powerful tool for finding homologous sequences in a large database by comparing a query sequence against a database of known sequences.
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The basic principle of BLAST involves searching for local sequence alignments between the query sequence and a database of known sequences, rather than searching for global alignments. This allows for the detection of regions of similarity between sequences, which may be fragmented or truncated.
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BLAST works by breaking down the query sequence into small fragments, called words, and searching for matches of these words in the database sequences. The matches are then extended to obtain local alignments with the highest similarity scores. The output of a BLAST search is a list of database sequences that have significant matches to the query sequence, along with a score indicating the level of similarity.
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BLAST can be used to search various databases, including protein and nucleotide databases, and can perform different types of searches, including:
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Blastn: Used to search for nucleotide sequence similarity against a nucleotide database.
Blastp: Used to search for protein sequence similarity against a protein database.
Blastx: Used to search for translated nucleotide sequence similarity against a protein database.
Tblastn: Used to search for protein sequence similarity against a nucleotide database translated in all six reading frames.
Tblastx: Used to search for translated nucleotide sequence similarity against a nucleotide database translated in all six reading frames.
BLAST is widely used in bioinformatics for a variety of applications, including identifying homologous proteins, detecting conserved domains, predicting protein structure and function, and annotating genomic sequences. It is a fast and efficient tool for sequence alignment and searching, and is essential for many bioinformatics analyses. BLAST BLAST BLAST