A BLAST from the past: revisiting blastp’s E-value

• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae729
• Publication Date: 2024-12-10T18:41:42Z
• Authors: Yang Young Lu; William Stafford ...; Uri Keich
• Keywords: Value (mathematics)

The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, BLAST, is an indispensable tool for genomic research. BLAST established itself as the canonical sequence similarity search in large part thanks to its meaningful statistical analysis. Specifically, reports E-value of each reported alignment, which defined expected number optimal local alignments that will score at least high observed alignment score, assuming query and database sequences are randomly generated.