BLAST for beginners introduces students to blastn, a commonly used tool for comparing nucleotide sequences (DNA and RNA).  This popular tutorial shows how to do a blast search with a nucleotide sequence, highlights some of the information that can be found in the search results and shows how to interpret some of the information, like the E value and alignment scores. 

The complete set of materials consists of:

1. 1. The BLAST for beginners tutorial.
   

2. 2. A set of unknown sequences.   
   

3. 3. A set of questions for students to answer.
   

4. 4. Instructors may obtain an updated answer key here.
   

Funding for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation's Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Program under grants DUE-0088153 and DUE-0127599, also from Bio-Link, an NSF Advanced Technology Education Center.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.