Section: Application Domains

Sequence comparison

Historically, sequence comparison has been one of the most important topics in bioinformatics. BLAST is a famous software tool particularly designed for solving problems related to sequence comparisons. Initially conceived to perform searches in databases, it has mostly been used as a general-purpose sequence comparison tool. Nowadays, together with the inflation of genomic data, other software comparison tools that are able to provide better quality solutions (w.r.t the ones provided by BLAST) have been developed. They generally target specific comparison demands, such as read mapping, bank-to-bank comparison, meta-genomic sample analysis, etc. Today, sequence comparison algorithms must clearly be revisited to scale up with the very large number of sequence objects that new NGS problems have to handle.