How BLAST Works & Using Web BLAST Effectively

This workshop is designed for begining BLAST users or people wanting a refresher on how blast works and some tips on how to run effective BLAST searches.

NCBI’s BLAST is one of the most widely used bioinformatics tool in the world.  It was designed to use a nucleotide or protein sequence to search and quickly find similar sequences in very large databases.  While originally designed for studying evolutionary relationships, BLAST is now often used for identification of:  the gene name and/or source organism of the sequence, related sequences from other organisms (homologs), as well as the location of a sequence within a larger reference sequence, such as a chromosome or genome.

This workshop is suitable both for beginner Web BLAST users and those who would like an update and some tips and tricks to enhance their ability to use this powerful bioinformatics tool. The topics we cover in this hands-on Web BLAST workshop come directly from feedback and questions we’ve received from people like you.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• • Adjust search settings to avoid errors and reduce search times
  • Choose the best database
  • Try out the new clustered nr database
  • Customize and download the search results
  • Display your BLAST results in an interactive sequence viewer

This workshop is designed for an overview of some basic BLAST tasks.  If you would like to learn more about Primer-BLAST, specifically, please take a look at this workshop's materials: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/ncbi/workshops/2022-10_Primer-BLAST