Dazzling Graphics
with Cn3D 3.0
BLAST Offers
Taxonomic Views
HomoloGene:
Clusters of Clusters
Fly Genome Deposited
in GenBank
BLAST Now Offers Taxonomic Views of the Output
NCBI’s Basic and Advanced BLAST services now offer the option of returning a taxonomically organized report. Clicking on the Taxonomy Reports link on the BLAST results page will generate taxonomy reports in three formats: a Lineage Report, an Organism Report, and a Taxonomy Report. Together, these three reports provide a broad overview of the taxonomic relationships among the records returned from a BLAST search.
The Lineage Report
The Lineage Report gives a simplified view of the relationships between the organisms generating database hits to the query sequence by showing how closely these organisms are related to a “focus organism”, according to the taxonomy database. This focus organism is the organism giving the strongest BLAST hit and this will often be the source organism of the query sequence.
The Organism Report
In the Organism Report, the BLAST results are grouped into blocks by species. Within each species block, the records are sorted by BLAST score. The order of species blocks themselves is based on the BLAST score of the best hit within the block.
The Taxonomy Report
The Taxonomy Report summarizes the relationships among all of the organisms found in the BLAST results. Using this report, it is easy to see how many records are found within broad taxonomic groups such as the mammalia, or the archaea.
For detailed information on the interpretation of the BLAST taxonomy reports, see the Help document at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/taxblasthelp.html. The new taxonomic output format is available via Basic or Advanced BLAST at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/.—SF, DW
