BOB (formerly TBOB) is a Blast Output Browser. BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is the search algorithm employed by the blast programs blastn and blastp, for example, for searching nucleotide or protein sequences against their respective databases.
Output from the blast programs can be difficult to read, especially when there are many search results to be analysed, each potentially with many matches with sequences in the database. The output from blast is usually a long text file with information spread throughout it; as a consequence, viewing this output can be difficult and inconvenient. TBOB solves this problem by only showing parts of the blast output at any time, letting the user jump from one place to another using simple one-keystroke commands.
BOB also permits retrieval of sequences from the NCBI retrieve email server, so that interesting sequences can be obtained for further analysis. This is particularly convenient as it can be performed while the blast results are being viewed.
BOB has a character-based interface, and therefore no special graphical capabilities are needed. .
This software was written by Pierre Rioux under the supervision of Tim Littlejohn. The development of tbob was supported by a grant from the Canadian Genome Analysis and Technology Program (now defunct).