Post mortem

Like all the scenarios, this one begins with a readily understandable task and ends with a mystery and underlying problem:

• Task: Figure out which protein toxin is killing a lot of people.
• Mystery: Why isn't Blast working the way I can see that it should?
• Problem: How do you align sequences using Blast and know what you're doing.

And, like all the others, this one is followed by tools for its solution:

Blast
Basic local alignment sequence tool. A tool to find matching regions between two sequences that may share limited similarity.

Homegrown Blast
You will write part of the program yourself, so that you can play with it and understand its guts. In this way, you will learn its power and its limitations.

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