Does Blast Use Multiple Sequence Alignment

Question

[User 5037]

does blast database search use multiple sequence alignment technique ?

[User1029725]

Answer: NO. It doesn't.

[Michael]

don't answer such questions, I see somebody cheating in their exams

[Fabian Bull]

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool

Answer 1

[Neilfws]

No. In a multiple alignment, you supply multiple sequences to be aligned. In BLAST, you supply one or more query sequences and the best matches for each in turn are discovered using a fast local alignment algorithm. Hence the name: Basic Local Alignment Search Tool - BLAST.

There is plenty of available literature on BLAST: start with the NCBI Handbook, then progress to the statistics of BLAST and the original publication.