Basic Local Alignment Search Tool 2006-05-07

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool is a set of similarity search programs designed to explore all of the available sequence databases regardless of whether the query is protein or DNA.
It uses a heuristic algorithm which seeks local as opposed to global alignments, and is therefore able to detect relationships among sequences which share only isolated regions of similarity.
It can be run locally as a full executable, and can be used to run BLAST searches against private, local databases, or downloaded copies of the NCBI databases. It runs on Mac OS, Win32, LINUX, Solaris, IBM AIX, SGI, Compaq OSF, and HP- UX systems.
Main features:
Nucleotide
- Quickly search for highly similar sequences (megablast)
- Quickly search for divergent sequences (discontiguous megablast)
- Nucleotide-nucleotide BLAST (blastn)
- Search for short, nearly exact matches
- Search trace archives with megablast or discontiguous megablast
Protein
- Protein-protein BLAST (blastp)
- Position-specific iterated and pattern-hit initiated BLAST (PSI- and PHI-BLAST)
- Search for short, nearly exact matches
- Search the conserved domain database (rpsblast)
- Protein homology by domain architecture (cdart)
Translated
- Translated query vs. protein database (blastx)
- Protein query vs. translated database (tblastn)
- Translated query vs. translated database (tblastx)
Genomes
- Human, mouse, rat, chimp cow, pig, dog, sheep, cat
- Chicken, puffer fish, zebrafish
- Environmental samples
- Protozoa
- Insects, nematodes, plants, fungi, microbial genomes, other eukaryotic genomes
Special
- Search for gene expression data (GEO BLAST)
- Align two sequences (bl2seq)
- Screen for vector contamination (VecScreen)
- Immunoglobin BLAST (IgBlast)
- SNP BLAST
Meta
- Retrieve results