Tag: Protein BLAST (BLASTp)

May 15, 2019 Webinar: Using taxonomic information and other improvements in standalone BLAST+ (2.9.0) and the v5 databases

Next Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at 11AM, NCBI staff will show you how to use the latest version of standalone BLAST+ (2.9.0) and the new accession-based DBv5 databases with built-in taxonomy information. You will learn how to limit searches to taxonomic groups and to retrieve sequences from the database by taxonomy without having to download an identifier list. You will also learn about additional improvements in the BLAST databases and programs that make them compatible with the new PDB identifiers and gi-less proteins from the Pathogen Detection Project.

Date and time: Wed, May 15, 2018 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM EDT

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about attending the webinar. A few days after the live presentation, you can view the recording on the NCBI YouTube channel. You can learn about future webinars on the Webinars and Courses page.

New videos on YouTube: NCBI resources, QuickBlastP, update to API keys for E-Utils, and advanced use of API keys

Need a refresher of what NCBI offers? Or just feel you aren’t taking full advantage of NCBI resources? Check out some of NCBI’s most recent recordings of NCBI Minute webinars up on the NCBI YouTube channel.

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Introducing the new Virus Sequence Search Interface

BLAST is a powerful search tool, but often a search is just the beginning of the journey. We put ourselves in the shoes of a researcher who has just sequenced a handful of samples from the latest viral outbreak and tried to understand what information would be most useful. We also reached out to researchers in the field and asked: a) what questions do they really want to answer? and b) how can NCBI best provide the answers? Based on insights from those questions and answers, we developed the new Virus Sequence Search Interface (Fig. 1). The Search Interface is an NCBI Labs project, which means it is an experimental project, and we may modify the resource based on your feedback and experiences.

Figure 1. The Virus Sequence Selection Interface. — **Figure 1.** The Virus Sequence Selection Interface. The Virus Sequence Selection Interface accepts as input nucleotide and protein accessions, as well as FASTA and plain-text formatted sequences. The user selects either “Nucleotide” or “Protein,” depending on the sequence type, and selects the virus type from the pull-down menu below the text entry field.

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January 10 NCBI Minute: QuickBLASTP — a program for rapidly finding high-scoring protein matches in large databases

In the next NCBI Minute on Wednesday, January 10, 2018, NCBI staff will demonstrate the new QuickBLASTP service that can search large databases at least 10X faster than traditional protein-protein BLAST (blastp). You will learn about the strategy QuickBLASTP uses to speed up the search. You will also see how to use the new QuickBLASTP service on the NCBI web BLAST site and how to access and run the standalone kblastp demonstration release.

Date & time: Wed, Jan 10, 2018 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM EST

QuickBLASTP adds pre-processing to BLAST search

QuickBLASTP, an accelerated version of BLASTP, adds a new pre-processing step to the non-redundant (nr) protein database. In a matter of seconds, QuickBLASTP will find approximately 97% of the database sequences with 70% or more identity to your query and around 98% of the database sequence with 80% or more identity to your query.

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SmartBLAST: Faster BLASTp search results in a graphical view

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is a popular tool for finding sequences in a given database that are similar to a query sequence. Traditionally, BLAST displays these results as a sorted list of matches between the query and each database sequence. While this display is useful for examining how each subject sequence matches the query, it treats all subject sequences the same, regardless of the quality of the sequence data or its annotation, and also does not allow easy comparisons between different subject sequences.

For example, the subject sequences may fall into multiple groups of similar sequences, or all of the subject sequences may be more similar to each other than to the query. A common way to obtain this information is to construct a multiple sequence alignment of the query and some or all of the subject sequences, but to this point, BLAST has not provided such alignments directly.

Enter SmartBLAST! SmartBLAST is a new and experimental NCBI tool that makes it easier to complete common sequence analysis tasks, such as finding a candidate protein name for a sequence, locating regions of high sequence conservation, or identifying regions covered by database sequences but missing from the query.

Continue reading “SmartBLAST: Faster BLASTp search results in a graphical view” →