09-09-2017, 04:08 PM
In bioinformatics, BLAST for Basic Local Alignment Search Tool is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as amino acid sequences of proteins or nucleotides of DNA sequences. A BLAST search allows an investigator to compare a sequence of queries with a library or database sequences and identify sequences of libraries that resemble the query sequence above a certain threshold.
Different types of BLAST are available according to query sequences. For example, after the discovery of a previously unknown gene in the mouse, a scientist will typically perform a BLAST search of the human genome to see if humans carry a similar gene; BLAST will identify sequences in the human genome that resemble the mouse gene based on sequence similarity. The algorithm and the BLAST program were designed by Stephen Altschul, Warren Gish, Webb Miller, Eugene Myers and David J. Lipman at the National Institutes of Health and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1990 and quoted more than 50,000 times.
