Curated BLAST for Genomes

“Curated BLAST for Genomes” finds candidate genes for a process or an enzymatic activity within a genome of interest. In contrast to annotation tools, which usually predict a single activity for each protein, Curated BLAST asks if any of the proteins in the genome are similar to characterized proteins that are relevant. Given a query such as an enzyme’s name or an EC number, Curated BLAST searches the curated descriptions of over 100,000 characterized proteins, and it compares the relevant characterized proteins to the predicted proteins in the genome of interest. In case of errors in the gene models, Curated BLAST also searches the six-frame translation of the genome. Curated BLAST is available at http://papers.genomics.lbl.gov/curated .