On January 25, 2022, the NCBI Education Team provided the workshop: An Update on NCBI BLAST and Other Sequence Analysis Tools. Training materials from this event are available on this page.

This virtual workshop highlights new displays and features and introduces best practices for use of NCBI BLAST services. You will learn when and how to use important but often misunderstood aspects of the BLAST programs, specialized services, and databases. You will explore other important sequence analysis services, including Primer BLAST, an oligonucleotide primer designer and specificity checker, and COBALT, a multiple protein sequence alignment tool. Finally, you will see brief demonstrations of standalone BLAST and related tools, including SRA-Toolkit BLAST and Magic-BLAST.

In this workshop, you will learn to:

• Select the correct NCBI alignment tool for your task
• Choose the best BLAST database for your search goal
• Understand and use the new BLAST results page, output formats and statistics
• Display BLAST results in genomic context using graphical displays
• Analyze nucleotide primers: design, check the specificity, and display primer alignments
• Assess the taxonomic distribution of your BLAST matches and use the TreeViewer display to visualize relationships
• Use standalone BLAST, Magic-BLAST and SRA-BLAST to search remote databases at the NCBI or on the cloud.

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.