Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am doing my science fair project based on the information on this site: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... ?from=Home The problem is, I don't know what to do after I BLAST the virus strains as far as interpreting the results. I have followed all of the experimental procedure outlined on the page, but it says nothing about how to analyze the information BLAST gives you to actually determine whether the vaccine was effective or not!

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as the science fair is in a little over a week, I need to figure this out very soon! Thank you!

Hi Jennifer,

BLAST is a tool that measures the similarity between the test sequence and sequences in a database. The results it displays are an alignment of the test sequence along side a sequence from the database and a score of how many nucleotides are the same (or amino aicds if you are blasting proteins).

Lets talk this through so that you can figure out what your results mean.
What sequence did you put into the BLAST?
Why were you BLASTing them, what were you hoping to find?
How do vaccines work?

-Caroline