1. What is BLAST?
   
   BLAST is the abbreviation of the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. BLAST compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches.
   

2. Where can I find information of BLAST?
   
   BLAST was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechonology Information (NCBI) in the US. The webpage is at http://ncbi.nih.gov/BLAST/.
   

3. How to run BLAST on TCG@NUS?
   
   BLAST was ported to TCG@NUS grid computing platform in August 2005.
   
   UD-BLAST is an application service wrapper for BLAST that has been developed to run BLAST Jobs on the UD GridMP platform, implemented by TCG@NUS. UD-BLAST automates the tasks involved in creating the UD-BLAST application, in creating and managing BLAST jobs, and in retrieving and merging results for BLAST search algorithms.
   
   UD-BLAST is an interactive text-based interface for UD-BLAST job submission, management and results retrieval. The command to launch the interface is "blastadmin", and the outlook is as follows:
   
   
   
   A shortcut command can be used to save time if you know which UD-BLAST program to run and which database will be used to sequence. For example:

   

   The shortcut command to retrieve the result is:

   blastadmin result 4312 out-4321.dat

   Where, 4321 is the job ID for the current job, and "out-4321.dat" is the result file.

 

Last Modified on 25th June 2008. Copyright - All Rights Reserved.