What is BLAST and How did it improve upon the alignment methods used previous to its development?
BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is a widely used software tool for comparing biological sequences such as DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. It was developed by Stephen F. Altschul and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the early 1990s.
Prior to the development of BLAST, sequence alignment methods relied on global alignment algorithms such as the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm, which aligns the entire length of two sequences. However, global alignment methods are computationally expensive and impractical for comparing large databases of sequences.
BLAST improved upon these methods by introducing a heuristic algorithm that performs local sequence alignments. Local alignments only align the most similar regions of two sequences and disregard unrelated regions, thus making it more efficient for searching large sequence databases.
Step by step
Solved in 2 steps
