BlastViewer Application

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) Viewer is an application used for displaying text, sequence and graphical summary of the Blast Search tool. It was initially developed by InforMax Inc. It is included in the Vector NTI software. The company was sold to Invitrogen in November, 2002. It has a comprehensive user interface which is composed of three main panes: Text, Analysis and Alignment panes.

The Text Pane contains a description of the query molecule. It also provides a feature map and a hit molecule list. It provides information such as query molecule name, query sequence and the Query Molecule section.

The Analysis pane provides the graphical summary of the query results. It has three panels:
1. Sequence Profile and Hit Distribution – it displays the unique and shared regions of a query molecule. It traces the query sequence residue from all hit elements. The number of hit elements is plotted against the molecule.
2. Query-Hit Alignment it displays the local similarity regions of each query and hit molecules. It also provides information such as the query sequence and selected molecule in the hit list.
3. Hit Map graph – it displays a graphical overview of the query sequence aligned with the hit sequence. It represents hit molecules’s most similar hits and least similar hits. Hovering the mouse cursor on top of the hit element bar will display the element name, score, bits and hit E-value.