Curated BLAST

Given a genome and a query, find characterized proteins whose descriptions match the query, and then search the genome for homologs of those proteins (example).

Or upload a genome or proteome in fasta format.

Curated BLAST relies on curated descriptions of over 100,000 experimentally-characterized proteins from Swiss-Prot, BRENDA, CAZy, CharProtDB, MetaCyc, EcoCyc, TCDB, REBASE, and the Fitness Browser.

Related tools

• Search for curated proteins by keyword
• PaperBLAST: Find papers about a protein or its homologs
• GapMind for amino acid biosynthesis

How it works

Curated BLAST finds curated proteins whose descriptions match the query and uses ublast to compare these to the annotated proteins in the genome. Then, it uses ublast to compare the curated proteins to all possible proteins in the genome (the six-frame translation).

For details see the paper from 2019 or the code. Changes since the paper:

• Added TCDB
• Shows hits to unannotated reading frames if they hit regions of the curated protein that were not hit by any annotated protein (or if they score more highly).