nodalpoint.org

I was looking for the best way to explain what is blast to people with no background in biology/bioinformatics.

I thought I could to say it's a search engine:
- Blast is the same as google, but for biological sequences instead of search terms.

April 2, 2007: New BLAST design to be released on April 16, 2007
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The new NCBI BLAST pages will become the default interface at
http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast on April 16, 2007. The new
interface is currently available as a beta release at
http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/beta/. For details on the new
interface, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/beta/about/.

After the new interface is released, the previous interface will
remain available from a link on the new front page until May 14,
2007.

A Note About URLAPI

Compute Cluster: DSC00179 © Jordan Thevenow-Harrison / CC I few months ago I was trying to track down information about Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, pay-as-you-go virtual clustering service. At the time Declan Butler had emailed me asking about the feasibility of running bioinformatics applications on EC2. My investigation of EC2 for bioinformatics applications turned up very little at the time, today however Andrew Perry has posted an analysis on the feasibility of EC2 for running mpiBLAST. If you're into bioinformatics clusters (of course) then go read it right away, if you've considered a cluster and balked at the expense then this may be a solution.

The down side is, Amazon's limited-beta for EC2 is now full. Hey Amazon, Bioinformatics is a growing market, might pay to help Andrew out with some account space ?