Answer to Question #119808 in Bioinformatics for Christopher

Question

What is the difference between blastn and tblastn?

Answer 1

Blastn uses nucleotide sequence as a query sequence to search the nucleotide-based databases, whereas tblastn uses protein sequence as a query sequence to search the same nucleotide-based databases. As a result, blastn searches for the sequence similar to the nucleotide query sequence. In contrast, tblastn uses protein sequence to find the possible related sequence that encodes the protein of interest.