B. Similarity Searching the databanks.

"I have sequenced a gene (or part of a gene). Are there any sequences in the molecular databanks that are similar to my sequence data?"

Will this task require enormous computer time, since

a few million sequences in the databases will be searched and compared with the query sequence
a similarity matrix will be statistically calculated
the statistics will need to be stored
the information will than be shifted and the comparisons sorted to find the best matches to the query sequence

Today computers do this type of work eg FASTA or BLAST search - and returns the results in about 5 minutes! (numerous other programmes also exist and include FLASH etc)

This type of similarity search is the first step for virtually all sequence analysis work.