has participant has participant output of output of has specified data input has format specification is executed in FASTA format GenBank format software BLAST The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) finds regions of local similarity between sequences. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families. Allyson Lister: added 'achieves objective' axioms for pairwise and multiple sequence alignment classes. Nandini Badarinarayan BLAST, or Basic Local Alignment Search Tool in full, is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences. http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi James Malone biological sequence data multiple sequence alignment pairwise sequence alignment software publishing process software development NIH