Tag: SmartBLAST
NCBI is discontinuing the BLink protein similarity service effective immediately. BLink provided graphical access to related proteins from protein records in the Entrez system. Because of the increasing volume of data in the protein database, BLink has become less useful as a tool for finding related sequences and is no longer maintainable.
Continue reading “Retiring and replacing the BLink protein similarity service”
The SmartBLAST service has recently been updated to emphasize matches to the landmark database, which comprises the proteomes from 26 well-curated genomic assemblies. The display also now presents more information about conserved domains and details about the query.
SmartBLAST quickly finds the closest relatives to a protein query and evaluates the phylogenetic relationship among the query and matched sequences. You can start a SmartBLAST search from the SmartBLAST page or the BLAST home page. Read more about SmartBLAST on NCBI Insights.
This blog post is intended for all BLAST users.
ORFfinder is a graphical analysis tool for finding open reading frames (ORFs). We’ve been working on a few updates, and we’d like to find out what you think about them. Read on to find out what you can do with the new ORFfinder.
Continue reading “Fast Sequence Inspection with ORFfinder + SmartBLAST”
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”
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