On October 14, 2021, the NCBI Education Team offered a workshop on Using Web BLAST Effectively. Training materials from this event are available on this page.
NCBI’s BLAST is 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.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to:
- Choose the best BLAST program and database for your goal
- Limit your search to a specific taxonomic group
- Adjust search parameters to refine your search
- Customize and download the search results
- Display your BLAST results in an interactive sequence viewer
- We will also discuss when web BLAST is not appropriate for your goals.
Keyboard controls: Space bar - toggle play/pause; Right and Left Arrow - seek the video forwards and back; Up and Down Arrow - increase and decrease the volume; M key - toggle mute/unmute; F key - toggle fullscreen off and on.
NOTE: This workshop assumes that you have some familiarity with running BLAST searches.
Return to NCBI Outreach Events.