BLAST search

CLC Genomics Workbench offers to conduct BLAST searches on protein and DNA sequences. In short, a BLAST search identifies homologous sequences between your input (query) query sequence and a database of sequences[McGinnis and Madden, 2004]. BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), identifies homologous sequences using a heuristic method which finds short matches between two sequences. After initial match BLAST attempts to start local alignments from these initial matches.

If you are interested in the bioinformatics behind BLAST, there is an easy-to-read explanation of this in Bioinformatics explained: BLAST.

Figure 16.1 shows an example of a BLAST result in the CLC Genomics Workbench.

Image blastresult
Figure 16.1: Display of the output of a BLAST search. At the top is there a graphical representation of BLAST hits with tool-tips showing additional information on individual hits. Below is a tabular form of the BLAST results.



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