This workshop will be broadcasted from the Taubman Health Sciences Library, Univ of Michigan, and highlights important features and demonstrates the practical aspects of using the NCBI BLAST service, the most popular sequence similarity service in the world. You will learn about useful but under-used features of the service. These include access from the Entrez sequence databases; the new genome BLAST service quick finder; the integration and expansion of Align-2- Sequences; organism limits and other filters; re-organized databases; formatting options and downloading options; and TreeView displays. You will also learn how to use other important sequence analysis services associated with BLAST including Primer BLAST, an oligonucleotide primer designer and specificity checker; the multiple protein sequence alignment tool, COBALT; and MOLE-BLAST, a new tool for clustering and providing taxonomic context for targeted loci sequences (16S, ITS, 28S). These aspects of BLAST provide easier access and results that are more comprehensive and easier to interpret.