Displaying BLAST search results

You can use the blast Search Results display dialog box to filter results and display a text view of the alignments, a list of hits and a graphical map showing your query and hits. A few statistics of the search are displayed in the statistics panel on the left side of the dialog. These include the name, size and build date of the database used and the length of time taken to perform the search. Below these are the best scores that were found, in particular the best (i.e. lowest) SumP(n) and the largest score obtained by a single high-scoring segment pair. Finally, the value of the expect parameter is shown, followed by the actual observed number of matches, and the number of matches that were saved and aligned.

TO DISPLAY BLAST search results

1. Ensure that the BLAST Search Results dialog box is displayed.
2. This dialog box is displayed automatically on completion of each analysis. Otherwise, if either of the result display windows (Description List or Aligned Sequences) is active, you can display the dialog box by choosing Database | Online search for Similar Sequences (BLAST).
3. Select the Description list check box to generate an annotated list of the matching sequences, numbered in the order that you specified in the Sorted By search parameter.
4. Select Aligned sequences if you want to retrieve and display the optimized alignments between the query sequence and each of the saved matching sequences.
5. Select MAP if you want to display a graphical map of your query and hits.
6. If you want to retrieve and display some, but not all, of the alignments, type the appropriate list numbers in the Entries to show text boxes.
7. Select OK to remove the BLAST Search Results dialog box and retrieve and display the chosen results.
8. If you need to display further results from the same search, ensure that an analysis display result window is active, and then choose Database | Online search for Similar Sequences (BLAST). The BLAST Search Results dialog box will be displayed again.

Any of the three different results windows can be used to retrieving matching sequences directly to your desktop or save to disk..

The Aligned Sequences window displays the alignments of the high scoring segment pairs between the query sequence and the database sequence. The appearance of the aligned sequence display can be changed interactively.

The aligned sequences output closely follows the traditional BLAST format used by NCBI:

- each matching sequence has a header section describing the accession numbers and definitions of the entry in the searched database

- the individual high-scoring segment pairs are presented with scoring information for each segment

- the actual alignments with the query sequence presented on top and the database sequence presented below.

Related Topics.

BLAST

Using BLAST searches

Retrieving matching sequences

Auto Annotation via BLAST.