Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access published online on April 24, 2008
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkn201
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NCBI BLAST: a better web interface
National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Building 38A, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 301 435 5991; Fax: +1 301 480 0814; Email: madden{at}ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Received January 30, 2008. Revised March 18, 2008. Accepted April 4, 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.