Browse to NCBI's BLAST page.

1. Here is a sequence that was just sequenced in a lab of your institution. Download the sequence to your computer and save it locally.
2. Run a blastn search on the NCBI server to identify similar sequences, that are already known.
3. Which gene has been sequenced here?
4. Is this the complete mRNA? How do you know?
5. Do a search against SwissProt (using blastx). Do you find all sequences you found in the nucleotide database?
6. Have a closer look at the alignments. Why are there small grey characters in the sequence? (Check the BLAST FAQs to find the answer.)