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Exercise 7B: BLAST
STA 4953 (Spring 2001)
Due 3/22/2001



This exercise simply asks you to visit the NCBI Web site to find out about the BLAST program.

  1. BLAST is an acronym. What does it stand for?
    Basic Local Alignment Search Tool
  2. What does the BLAST program do?
    Blast takes as input either a nucleic acid seqence (consisting of nucleotide bases) or protein sequence (consisting of amino acids) as a query and compares the query sequence to a database of sequences to find sequences similar to the query.
  3. Who are the people involved in designing the original version of BLAST?
    BLAST was written by Warren Gish, formerly of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), in collaboration with Stephen Altschul, Webb Miller, Eugene Myers, David Lipman, and David States.
    Go through one BLAST tutorial. Do you encounter any problems? If so, write them down.