You can submit DNA or protein sequences to be automatically BLAST searched against the latest GenBank sequences each week. DBWatcher runs searches of your sequences against the GenBank "month" database each Sunday night at midnight and sends the results to you by e-mail. This is a handy service if you want to keep track of all new sequences that are added to GenBank that are similar to genes of interest in your research.
You may submit as many sequences as you wish to be searched by DBWatcher, but each sequence must be set up as a separate job. Use the "Create DBWatcher Job" button below to set up a sequence to be searched. Just paste your sequence (as a raw sequence or in FASTA format) into the sequence field, indicate whether it is a DNA or protein sequence, and whether you wish to search against the DNA or protein database at NCBI (protein searches are generally more sensitive, even for DNA sequences, if your sequence is protein coding). You can also choose a sensitivity cutoff - the smaller the E-value, the less sensitive your search will be to find distantly related sequences, but the fewer false positives will be found.
Be sure to give the Job a name that will be meaningful to you when you get the search results by e-mail.
If you have already set up DBWatcher Jobs and you wish to delete one or more of them, click the "Delete DBWatcher Job" button below. [To modify a job, just delete it and create a new one with modified parameters.]
You will receive two e-mails from DBWatcher each week for each Job that you create (each sequence that you submit). The first e-mail contains a list of the sequences in the NCBI "month" database that match your query sequence and the scores for each match. The second e-mail contains the actual alignments of your query sequence and the matching database sequences. In order to make sense of these alignments, you must view them in a mono-spaced font such as Courier or Monaco. You can either change the font used by your e-mail program, or copy and paste the entire text of the e-mail into a text editor program such as SimpleText (on the Mac).