Applications of network BLAST server.

The sequence databases continue to grow at an extraordinary rate. Contributions come from both small laboratories and large-scale projects, such as the Merck EST project. This growth has placed new demands on computational sequence comparison tools such as BLAST. Even now it is no longer practical to evaluate some BLAST reports manually; it is necessary to filter the output by, for example, organism, source, or degree of annotation. The new network BLAST service makes such tools possible. It is also possible to present BLAST output in different formats, such as BLANCE. Perhaps most important of all, it becomes simple to call BLAST from another application, making it one step within an integrated system. This makes the automated preparation of sequence evaluations that include BLAST runs possible. In the near future we expect to see a number of applications that use the network BLAST interface to help molecular biologists search against a database that is growing not only in size but in biological richness.