New NCBI BLAST email server

[Tom Madden]

This announcement describes a new BLAST email server from the NCBI.  This 
new server has some important new features, such as better filtering for
low-complexity sequences and results that can be read in a web browser, 
while providing backwards compatability with the present server.  

Queries to this server should be sent to "newblast at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov";
questions and comments are welcome at "blast-help at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov".

regards,

Tom Madden

=-+==============  NCBI BLAST E-Mail Server Instructions  =================

These are the instructions for the new NCBI BLAST email server.  Important
new features of this server are:

        1.) Filtering of the query sequence is performed as the
        default.  Low complexity sequence that is found by a filter
        program is substituted using the letter "N" in nucleotide
        sequence and the letter "X" in protein sequences.  The program
        'dust' is used for BLASTN queries; 'seg' is used for all
        others.  For a description of these filtering programs, the
        advantages of filtering, and instructions on how to perform
        queries without filtering, see section 5.

        2.) There are two new directives: NCBI_GI, which causes the GI to
        be displayed in the output; and HTML, which causes the output to 
        be in HTML format, suitable for viewing by a web viewer (save the
        email to a file with the extension ".html" and load into the web
        browser using the "Open File" command under the "File" menu).  
        Both of these options are discussed in section 5.


The NCBI BLAST E-mail server allows a similarity search to be performed against
a standard sequence database by sending it a properly composed mail message
that, among other elements, contains the user's nucleotide or protein query
sequence.  The query sequence is compared against the specified database using
the BLAST algorithm; the results are then returned to the user in a mail 
message.