NCBI BLAST: a better web interface

Johnson, Mark
Zaretskaya, Irena
Raytselis, Yan
Merezhuk, Yuri
McGinnis, Scott
Madden, Thomas L.

National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Building 38A, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA

Received January 30, 2008; Revised March 18, 2008; Accepted April 4, 2008

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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Nucleic Acids Research 36:p W5-W9, July 1, 2008.

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a sequence similarity search program. The public interface of BLAST, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast, at the NCBI website has recently been reengineered to improve usability and performance. Key new features include simplified search forms, improved navigation, a list of recent BLAST results, saved search strategies and a documentation directory. Here, we describe the BLAST web application's new features, explain design decisions and outline plans for future improvement.