Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a sequence similarity search program. The public interface of BLAST, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ blast, at the NCBI website has recently been reengineered to improve usability and performance. Key new features include simplified search forms, improved navigation, a list of recent BLAST results, saved search strategies and a documentation directory. Here, we describe the BLAST web application’s new features, explain design decisions and outline plans for future improvement.
['Mark S. Johnson', 'Irena Zaretskaya', 'Yan Raytselis', 'Yuri Merezhuk', 'Scott D. McGinnis', 'Thomas L. Madden']
NCBI BLAST: a better web interface