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VCU Libraries

Today's Hours

Introduction to Genomic Databases Workshop Series

Online asynchronous

Activity and Assignment

BLAST Activities
To be done after the session

Presentation

BLAST Presentation

BLAST video playlist

Resource Shortcuts

BLAST
The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families.

Learn more about BLAST

NCBI BLAST Documentation / Help Page
How To Primer BLAST
PDF Guide at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/factsheets/HowTo_PrimerBLAST.pdf
How To BLAST Guide
Overview of BLAST, including descriptions of databases that can be searched at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/factsheets/HowTo_BLASTGuide.pdf
Primer-BLAST: A tool to design target-specific primers for polymerase chain reaction
An article describing Primer BLAST and giving a basic tutorial

NCBI BLAST Services
Produced by the NCBI, this 28-page set of exercises has sections for protein BLAST, taxonomy reports, nucleotide BLAST, genomic BLAST, primer BLAST, and more.

Webinar: A Practical Guide to NCBI BLAST
80+ minute webinar from 2015 on using BLAST.
Karlin-Altschul Statistics
Lecture notes from a course that give an overview of how the E value statistics are computed. It has definitions and explanations of some of the tables shown in the assignment exercise.