1.5 The Next Step

This chapter has taken you through a simple BLASTN search at the NCBI database; however, more than two dozen specialized BLAST pages are available, and they let you do anything—from screening for vector sequence, to identifying protein family members, to mapping a sequence to the human genome. For a quick guide to these specialized pages, the NCBI presents a convenient reference to these tools at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/producttable.html.