Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I'm doing a project about influenza viruses. The experiment shows the effectiveness of different vaccines. In order to find out the effect I have to use the a program called the BLAST. Unfortunately I don't know how to work the BLAST program.

To read the experiment:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... l?from=TSW

The procedures of the experiment are listed under the subtitle:

Experimental Procedure

Please answer!
Thank you.

Hi there,

If you want to use BLAST directly on the ISD website, it looks like you would need to purchase a subscription. This would be the easiest option since it narrows your search down to virus sequences only, as opposed to sequences from all types of organisms. However, it costs a lot of money.

The alternative is to get the sequence data from ISD, then use the general BLAST tool available at NCBI. Here is a tutorial on using the NCBI BLAST:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Education/B ... orial.html

Since you want to look at the DNA sequence, not the protein sequence, you will want to use "blastn" (the nucleotide blast).

Hope this helps,
Grace