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Established in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information, NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information - all for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease.

 

 

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families.

NCBI has recently designed the BLAST interface to improve usability.

New features include:

A list of search results performed within the past 36 hours
Search strategies that can be saved to MyNCBI
Reorganized home-page links to BLAST forms
Redesigned BLAST forms with usability enhancements
A documentation catalog

All pages in the new design have the same page header. The page header always has the standard MyNCBI login box at the top right, and a link to the NCBI home page at the top left.

The footer of every page has links to NCBI's copyright, disclaimer, privacy, accessibility pages; a contact page; and links to the home pages of NCBI and its parent organizations.

BLAST Assembled Genomes contains links to genomic BLAST pages for common organisms, and a link to a complete list of available organism genome BLAST pages