BLAST (Biotechnology)

BLAST, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, is a bioinformatics algorithm that compares a protein or nucleotide sequence against a database of sequences to find matches above a chosen similarity threshold. It was created by Stephen Altschul, Warren Gish, Webb Miller, Eugene Myers and David Lipman at the National Institutes of Health and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1990. BLAST uses a heuristic approach that trades some accuracy for speed, making it far faster on large-scale searches than exhaustive methods such as Smith-Waterman alignment. Its speed and practicality have made it one of the most cited tools in computational biology, used to search the ever-growing genomic and protein databases. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/