BLAST is a computational tool used by genome biologists to do what?
1 Answer
In bioinformatics BLAST is an algorithm used for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino acid sequence of proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequence.
Explanation:
BLAST stands for Basic Local Alignment Search Tool.
A BLAST search enables a researcher to compare a query sequence with a library or data base of sequences that resemble the query sequence above a certain thresh hold.
BLAST can be used for several purposes . These include identifying a species, locating domains, establishing phylogeny , DNA mapping and comparison.
Before fast algorithms such as BLAST were developed, doing database searches for proteins and nucleic sequences was very time consuming because a full alignment procedure was used.
BLAST is also often used as part of other algorithms that require approximate sequence matching.
