I'm relatively new to bioinformatics, so I apologize ahead of time if this is a simple question. I attempted to use the webtool BLAST search for a short nucleotide sequence (18bp) and got the "No significant similarity found" message. The confusing part is my colleague performed the exact same query and found many results. I've gone through and double checked our searches and from my untrained eye it seems like our search parameters are identical, as well as the same database (same posted time stamp, sequence #, etc). What could possibly cause BLAST to return different results from the exact same queries? I'll include both queries below:
I appreciate any help you could offer. Thank you in advance!
EDIT Well color me double stumped. Clearing my browser cache seemed to clear up the issue. I would still like to know if anyone has any ideas on root cause of this. I can just habitually clear my browser cache before I BLAST, but maybe there's some simple thing I'm missing?
if you sort by "Description", the results look the same...
I see the exact same results. I think BLAST saves search queries, not results so it re-queries when I visit using that link. You may want to try a different browser (or clear cache, etc) and check if you still see a discrepancy.