Question

Which of the following uses the BLAST program?
A. Proteomics
B. DNA barcoding
C. Bioinformatics
D. None of the above

Answer 1

Hint: BLAST is a computer algorithm that can be found on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website, among many others. BLAST can quickly align and compare a query DNA sequence to a database of sequences, making it an important tool in ongoing genomic research.

complete answer:
BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) is a bioinformatics algorithm and program that compares primary biological sequence information, such as amino-acid sequences of proteins or nucleotides of DNA and/or RNA sequences.
A BLAST search allows a researcher to compare a subject protein or nucleotide sequence (referred to as a query) to a library or database of sequences, and identify database sequences that resemble the query sequence above a certain threshold.
BLAST identifies homologous sequences using a heuristic method that looks for short matches between two sequences at first; thus, the method does not consider the entire sequence space. Following the initial match, BLAST attempts to begin local alignments based on these initial matches.
For example, after discovering a previously unknown gene in the mouse, a scientist will typically conduct a BLAST search of the human genome to see if humans have a similar gene; BLAST will identify sequences in the human genome that resemble the mouse gene based on sequence similarity.

Thus, the correct answer is option C: Bioinformatics.

Note:
FASTA was created in 1985 by David J. Lipman and William R. Pearson before BLAST. Before the development of fast algorithms such as BLAST and FASTA, searching databases for protein or nucleic sequences took a long time because a full alignment procedure (e.g., the Smith-Waterman algorithm) was used.
BLAST was inspired by Samuel Karlin and Stephen Altschul's stochastic model from 1990. They proposed "a method for estimating similarities between the known DNA sequence of one organism and that of another", and their work has been called "the statistical foundation for BLAST".