BLAST

The BLAST program was developed by Stephen Altschul of NCBI in 1990 and has since
become one of the most popular programs for sequence analysis. BLAST uses heuristics to align
a query sequence with all sequences in a database The objective isto find high-scoring ungapped
segments among related sequences. The existence of such segments above a given threshold
indicates pairwise similarity beyond random chance, which helps to discriminate related
sequences from unrelated sequences in a database. BLAST performs sequence alignment through
the following steps. The first step is to create a list of words from the query sequence Each word
is typically three residues for protein sequences and eleven residues for DNA sequences. The list
includes every possible word extracted fromthe query sequence

BLAST is a family of programs that includes BLASTN, BLASTP, BLASTX TBLASTN, and
TBLASTX. BLASTN queries nucleotide sequences with a nucleotide sequence database. The
BLAST output provides a list of pairwise sequence matches ranked by statistical significance.
The significance scores help to distinguish evolutionarily related
sequences from unrelated ones. Generally, only hits above a certain threshold are displayed.
BLAST compares a query sequence against all database sequences, and so the E-value is
determined by the following formula:

E= m× n× P
STEPS PERFORMED IN BLAST(solving to find the similarity of a sequence that we have)

 Go to NCBI website http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

 Once entered look for the blast option on the screen

 The user is redirected to a new page for BLAST .
 The BLAST tool has to be specifically selected from BLASTp, BLASTn, BLASTx
 Nucleotide blast is selected

 After entering into basic BLAST tool page, a space has been provided to enter our query to
search

 The space provided there can be used to enter either accession number or the FASTA format
of our sequence

 The sequence for blast have been earlier retrieved by using entrez search,which the procedure
has not been mentioned here

 The sequence has been selected is that of human insulin

 The FAST format have been selected and pasted onto the space and the BLAST button
has been selected to run the program
 The result is displayed ,A thick Bue bar display the query sequence that we used
 A scale is present that show first and last position
 The consecutive red bars show the part of sequence which is similar to the query
sequence in different database sequences that is searched
 A description table is shown with percentage similarity and score
RESULT
INFERENCE
From the above table and the sequence matching it is found that the sequence of
Homo sapiens INS-IGF2 readthrough (INS-IGF2), RefSeqGene on chromosome
11, Homo sapiens insulin (INS), RefSeqGene on chromosome 11, Homo sapiens
chromosome 11, clone RP11-889I17, shows a 100% similarity with a score of
2643, this is in correlation as the sequence that we selected was that of human
insulin.