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Bioinformatics

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. (description from NLM/NCBI)

Getting started and guides:

For a detailed description of the statistics behind local alignment calculations that are used in BLAST, the following YouTube videos are available.

  • The Statistics of Local Pairwise Sequence Alignment, Part 1  Stephen Altschul  January 22, 2015
  • The Statistics of Local Pairwise Sequence Alignment, Part 2  Stephen Altschul  January 29, 2015