Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST)

BLAST is a software tool for searching similarity in nucleotide sequences (DNA) and/or amino acid (protein) sequences.

• similarity search of nucleotide or amino acid sequences
• allows gaps (deletions and insertions)
  
• local alignment: detect regions (subsequences) that are similar between two compared sequences
• homology search of gene or protein sequences. For short read mapping see bowtie2 or BWA.