RefSeq select offers a high-quality set of transcript and protein sequences for human and mouse; for prokaryotes, RefSeq select is the set of proteins annotated on RefSeq reference and representative genomes. You can now search these sets on the nucleotide and protein BLAST services. The new databases are RefSeq Select rna sequences and RefSeq Select proteins (Figure 1). 
Figure 1. The new BLAST RefSeq Select rna (top panel) and protein (bottom panel) databases and results. The searches used the erythroid hexokinase 1 transcript (NM_033496.3) and protein (NP_277031.1) as queries. The protein BLAST search was limited to Clostridia (taxid:186801) to highlight prokaryote matches.
Searches against these more compact databases run faster and give search results that are better defined and easier to interpret. You can also download the pre-formatted refseq_select_rna and refseq_select_protein databases from the BLAST db FTP directory for use with a local BLAST installation. You can also get these databases on the Amazon and Google clouds with the BLAST+ Docker image.
Please write to us at [email protected] and let us know what you think of these new databases.
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