BLAST2SRS, a web server for flexible retrieval of related protein sequences in the SWISS-PROT and SPTrEMBL databases

SRS (Sequence Retrieval System) is a widely used keyword search engine for querying biological databases. BLAST2 is the most widely used tool to query databases by sequence similarity search. These tools allow users to retrieve sequences by shared keyword or by shared similarity, with many public web servers available. However, with the increasingly large datasets available it is now quite common that a user is interested in some subset of homologous sequences but has no efficient way to restrict retrieval to that set. By allowing the user to control SRS from the BLAST output, BLAST2SRS (http://blast2srs.embl.de/) aims to meet this need. This server therefore combines the two ways to search sequence databases: similarity and keyword.