How Ncbi Blastn Gets The List Of Organisms Programatically

Question

[raydoyle]

Hi, Those who use the NCBI BLAST web site recognize the "Choose Search Set" box. After you select OTHER database and you type - in the Organism edit field - an organism name, similar organism names are listed (autocomplete feature). For example type "Bos t"

http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PROGRAM=blastn&BLAST_PROGRAMS=megaBlast&PAGE_TYPE=BlastSearch&SHOW_DEFAULTS=on&LINK_LOC=blasthome

Does somebody know which (Entrez?) database are queried and/or parameters used to list the autocompleted names? Sample code maybe?

Cheers

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

-1 for the unclear title. please edit the title of your question. Ideally, the title of a question should be such that any other user will be able to choose whether he/she is interested on the topic without having to open the discussion. For example, your question seems to be related to blast: you should say so in the title.

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

The database is the NCBI Taxononmy database . It is available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/taxonomyhome.html . It can be searched as a web service using the NCBI-EUtilities (see the parameters here) or you can download it from here.

Answer 2

[Alex]

Check this url

http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/corecgi/ajax/ajax.fcgi?dict=taxids_sg&q=mouse&$svc$=ac

Where:

• dict=taxids_sg - taxids_sg dictionary
• q - your query
• $svc$=ac - autocomplete service

But I didn't find any public documentation about this service.