<p>As always with bioinformatics, any reasonable answer will be dependendant on what you want to do with this sequence, and you haven't provided enough information in that regard.</p>

<p>For most exploratory analysis BLAST is good enough. You don't <em>have to</em> follow any existing methods. The benefit of using NCBI's web BLAST server is that it provides you with a very quick way to find a match from the sequence information in GenBank.</p>

<p>BLAST does a local alignment. If you have the full 16s sequence, and it's a novel organism, you <em>might</em> get different match results from a program that does global alignment, but then again you might get different results from a different local alignment tool.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-12-10T11:14:50.203Z
2017-12-10T11:14:50.203Z
gringer
<p>I have the 16S DNA Sequence of a Microorganism. Can I confirm its identity by only running a BLAST or do I have to follow other methods. If so please mention the methods.  </p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-12-10T11:02:53.950Z
Can you please clarify this question? Do you have a *single* 16s DNA sequence, or multiple sequences? What proportion of the 16s gene is represented by this sequence?
gringer
<ngs>
Identification of Microorganism
# Identification of Microorganism

(Asked by: username_0 on 2017-12-10)

I have the 16S DNA Sequence of a Microorganism. Can I confirm its identity by only running a BLAST or do I have to follow other methods. If so please mention the methods.

**Tags:** ngs
> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Can you please clarify this question? Do you have a *single* 16s DNA sequence, or multiple sequences? What proportion of the 16s gene is represented by this sequence?  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2017-12-10. Score: 3

As always with bioinformatics, any reasonable answer will be dependendant on what you want to do with this sequence, and you haven't provided enough information in that regard.

For most exploratory analysis BLAST is good enough. You don't *have to* follow any existing methods. The benefit of using NCBI's web BLAST server is that it provides you with a very quick way to find a match from the sequence information in GenBank.

BLAST does a local alignment. If you have the full 16s sequence, and it's a novel organism, you *might* get different match results from a program that does global alignment, but then again you might get different results from a different local alignment tool.


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