Question

Currently, there are two major heuristic algorithms for performing database searches: BLAST and FASTA.

(a) True

(b) False

I had been asked this question in my homework.

The doubt is from Heuristic Database Searching in division Database Similarity Searching of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct option is (a) True

Best explanation: These methods are not guaranteed to find the optimal alignment or true homologs, but are 50–100 times faster than dynamic programming. The increased computational speed comes at a moderate expense of sensitivity and specificity of the search, which is easily tolerated by working molecular biologists. Both programs can provide a reasonably good indication of sequence similarity by identifying similar sequence segments.