familiar with NCBI?! - need your help (Jun/15/2006 )

hi everybody,

i'm new to this field

i'm starting to use NCBI, and ther are many new things i need to know

plz; in ur words: what is the purpose of using BLAST?
what these words mean: E-value, score?

discussion with experts may help me more than just reading tutorials on the site...

appreciate ur help.......

blast is an enine for searching similarities between sequences. You can so find homologues ortho and even paralogues of your seq.
E value is a probability that a random sequence give yours. generalle 1.10^(-15) or sthg similar.

I suggest you read the blast book (o'reilly press) - you will get no other better source of information on blast.

thanx so much...

try this......

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/blast_FAQs.shtml#Expect


Regards,
Connice