[Grad-Cap Icon] Training

NCBI now offers a series of two-day training courses called Discovery Workshops. Each Workshop will consist of four 2.5-hour hands-on sessions emphasizing a different set of NCBI resources. This session, "NCBI BLAST Services," highlights new features and demonstrates the practical aspects of using the NCBI BLAST, the most popular sequence similarity service in the world. The workshop demonstrates useful but under-used features of the updated service including direct access from the Entrez sequence databases; the integration and expansion of Align-2-Sequences; organism limits, other filters and re-organized databases on the submission forms; formatting options (CDS,sorting by position, taxonomy reports) and downloading options on results; and TreeView analysis of results. It also shows how the new conserved domain enhanced protein BLAST service (DELTA-BLAST) improves the sensitivity and specificity of protein BLAST and demonstrates two new sequence analysis services that have been added to the BLAST area of the NCBI site: Primer BLAST, an oligonucleotide primer designer and specificity checker, and a multiple protein sequence alignment tool (COBALT). These new aspects of BLAST provide easier access and results that are more comprehensive and easier to interpret and analyze. Each session uses specific examples to highlight important features of the resources and tools under study and to demonstrate how to accomplish common tasks. Participants are highly encouraged to bring their laptop for a hands-on experience. The instructor will present a specific example using the live NCBI web site followed by a period of individual practice on related problems. Detailed handouts for each session will provide step-by-step instructions and additional information about each example. Individual consultations with NCBI staff are available 3:45 - 5:00 pm on both January 29 and January 30 by request. Please email mackta@vcu if you are interested in scheduling a consultation. For more information, visit http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/education/workshops/