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Blast
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9780596002992
Edition: 1st
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596002998
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 339
Publication Date: June 01, 2003
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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Editorial Review:
Sequence similarity is a powerful tool for discovering biological function. Just as the ancient Greeks used comparative anatomy to understand the human body and linguists used the Rosetta stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, today we can use comparative sequence analysis to understand genomes. BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), is a sophisticated software package for rapid searching of nucleotide and protein databases. It is one of the most important software packages used in sequence analysis and bioinformatics. Most users of BLAST, however, seldom move beyond the program's default parameters, and never take advantage of its full power. BLAST is the only book completely devoted to this popular suite of tools. It offers biologists, computational biology students, and bioinformatics professionals a clear understanding of BLAST as well as the science it supports. This book shows you how to move beyond the default parameters, get specific answers using BLAST, and how to interpret your results. The book also contains tutorial and reference sections covering NCBI-BLAST and WU-BLAST, background material to help you understand the statistics behind BLAST, Perl scripts to help you prepare your data and analyze your results, and a wealth of tips and tricks for configuring BLAST to meet your own research needs. Some of the topics covered include: - BLAST basics and the NCBI web interface
- How to select appropriate search parameters
- BLAST programs: BLASTN, BLASTP, BLASTX, TBLASTN, TBLASTX, PHI-BLAST, and PSI BLAST
- Detailed BLAST references, including NCBI-BLAST and WU-BLAST
- Understanding biological sequences
- Sequence similarity, homology, scoring matrices, scores, and evolution
- Sequence Alignment
- Calculating BLAST statistics
- Industrial-strength BLAST, including developing applications with Perl and BLAST
BLAST is the only comprehensive reference with detailed, accurate information on optimizing BLAST searches for high-throughput sequence analysis. This is a book that any biologist should own.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Very Practical & Useful Users Guide
From a users-perspective this book serves its purpose well - it explains what it is that BLAST is doing "under-the-hood" so that one may better customize Blast's search behavior. All I know is that I really learned a lot of basic fundamental core concepts here that I previously just took for granted.
The book discusses the biology, statistics, algorithms, and computer science issues involved in explaining blast. I liked this approach because it does not head super far into any one core ... Read More
Rating: - Blast User's Bible
This is the place to start for anyone using NCBI BLAST. It's a thorough description of the various BLAST programs for nucleotides, amino acids, and codons.
The book offers a biology refresher early on, but this is aimed mainly at people with serious interest in BLAST - people who normally won't need that. Next, it discusses traditional dynamic programming alsorithms for local and global alignment. Then, in just a few pages, it summarizes the mathematical meanings and derivations of the ... Read More
Rating:  - useful for comparative sequence alignment tasks
BLAST is a well-known tool for bioinformatics (biological sciences+computer sciences). In this book contains a concepts of central dogma of molecular biology, sequence aligment, sequece similarity, practical BLAST programs (divide into 5 programs), and how to install and use BLAST tool. Moreover, it also offers enough tips to improve my BLAST searches usage. I think this book's content is well-writing and well-organizing for comparative sequeces alignment tasks. I use this book to begin in bioinformatics ... Read More
Rating: - How does sequence alignment actually work?
If you want to understand the nuts and bolts of how sequence alignment works, then this is the book for you. It will be especially useful for BLAST users who want to understand how it actually works and also for developers who don't know much biology, struggle with the math, but have no problem reading a perl script.
The book is basically divided into:
0. A Foreword by Stephen Altschul (the co-creator of BLAST)
1. A quick web intro to a BLAST search
2. Sequence alignment and how the algorithms ... Read More
Rating: - Author comments
As the first reviewer mentioned, the book is not a fast read. In order
to run BLAST properly one must understand how and why it works. BLAST
exists at the intersection of molecular biology, computer science, and
statistics. This might sound intimidating, but once you read about these
topics in chapters 2-4, you'll see that it isn't so complicated and it
all fits together nicely. We know that BLAST users come from a variety
of backgrounds and we have therefore written the book for a general
Read More
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