{"id":2043,"date":"2018-01-16T11:41:38","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T16:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2018-03-19T11:45:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T15:45:53","slug":"viral-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/2018\/01\/16\/viral-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the new Virus Sequence Search Interface"},"content":{"rendered":"
BLAST is a powerful search tool, but often a search is just the beginning of the journey. We put ourselves in the shoes of a researcher who has just sequenced a handful of samples from the latest viral outbreak and tried to understand what information would be most useful. We also reached out to researchers in the field and asked: a) what questions do they really<\/em> want to answer? and b) how can NCBI best provide the answers? Based on insights from those questions and answers, we developed the new Virus Sequence Search Interface<\/a> (Fig. 1). The Search Interface is an NCBI Labs project, which means it is an experimental project, and we may modify the resource based on your feedback and experiences.<\/p>\n This tool provides rapid insight into query sequences by presenting Blastn and Blastp results alongside normalized metadata, when available. These include: isolation source, host, country, and date, as well as genetic attributes such as completeness, and segment or protein names when applicable. The normalized metadata is generated via an internal, curator-guided data-processing pipeline that maps sequence-record attributes to standardized vocabularies to provide a user-friendly view of the data.<\/p>\n The interface currently supports BLAST searches for influenza viruses, rotavirus A, dengue viruses, West Nile virus, Zika virus, ebolaviruses, and MERS coronavirus sequences.<\/p>\n Get started now:<\/strong><\/p>\n The results of the search will appear below the search box (Fig. 2).<\/p>\n The results table can be customized by adding or deleting the columns from \u201cSelect Columns\u201d menu (Fig. 3).<\/p>\n Not only are BLAST results presented alongside normalized metadata, but the results can be refined by filtering along these terms (Fig. 4).<\/p>\n Additionally, to further facilitate rapidly placing your sequence of interest in a biological context, the results can be viewed as a phylogenetic-tree or as a multiple sequence alignment (Figs. 5, 6, and 7).<\/p>\n We invite you to try out this tool and send us your feedback!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BLAST is a powerful search tool, but often a search is just the beginning of the journey. We put ourselves in the shoes of a researcher who has just sequenced a handful of samples from the latest viral outbreak and tried to understand what information would be most useful. We also reached out to researchers … Continue reading Introducing the new Virus Sequence Search Interface<\/span> <\/a>
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