Week 3 - Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST)
Please note that there will not be an in-person lecture this week. We will upload a pre-recorded video on Friday morning. Please do continue to ask questions on the Piazza forum
This week we will be looking at BLAST which is arguably the most successful and widely used Bioinformatics algorithm ever. We show you how to use BLAST services at NCBI to do some practical sequence searching, investigating the possible functions and relationships between genes and proteins. We also introduce the basic concept of BLAST and it's associated statistics and also some of the specialised version of BLAST that are used in specific experimental scenarios.
Lecture 3 - Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST)
The lecture slides for Week 3 - "Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST)" is available here.
The video of the lecture is available from the GitHub video area here.
Reading Lists & Resources
Each week we will have an accompanying reading list with some articles & web-sites for self study to support the course. You can find the course "Resource List" - here. We will continue to curate the list throughout the course especially if things pop up in the lectures and practicals that we want to add a reference or link to so do please check back in on the list from time to time.
We have generally tried to identify resources as "Essential", "Recommended" or "Further Reading" in an attempt to help you prioritise your reading during the course.
Finally a very important time to draw your attention to what you can consider the "core text" for the course, which is the excellent "Bioinformatics & Functional Genomics" Third Edition by Jonathan Pevsner. You will be pleased to know that this text-book is available free online as part of the University's subscription portfolio. You can find it right at the top of the resource list. If you have any problems accessing or using any of the above please do drop us a comment in the Discussion forum and we will try to get things resolved as soon as possible.
This week you should try to read Chapter 4 - "Basic Local Alignment Search Tool" of BFG.