Welcome to the BLUR website.

BLUR (BLast Unexpected Ranking) is a tool designed to highlight, on the whole proteome level, protein divergences between species that result from divergence or loss of a domain and/or motif in a specific taxon. It is based on precomputed BLAST searches for a variety of model organism queries, allowing the study of all major life groups.

The BLUR method is based on the hypothesis that in a “classic” case, the succession of hits in a BLAST result will approximately respect a defined taxonomic order, whereas for proteins presenting an atypical pattern of conservation, the order will be altered and two usually close taxa will diverge in the BLAST result.

You can see an example here.

BLUR allows you to select two groups of species of interest to compare together, in order to find cases where one group or the other might diverge from what is expected.

You can see a list of all the available species here.

See our help page to assist you in your choice of species.
01.

Select a query species

Select the query species used for the BLAST homology search, each one allows you to study a particular life group. Choose first the life domain you want to study, then a query according to the group in which your species of interest belong.
Click here for a list of all available queries.

Select domain
  • Archaea
  • Bacteria
  • Eukaryota
02.

Select your first group of species

You can select one or several species or taxa by adding search fields by clicking on the + sign. You can search either using the scientific name or the NCBI taxonomy ID. We highly recommend using more than three species for this analysis.


03.

Select your second group of species

You can select one or several species or taxa by adding search fields by clicking on the + sign. Select species taxonomically close to your targets, to use as a comparison in the BLAST results.

You can also click the button for a suggestion of taxa related to your first group selected automatically using taxonomy.


Use orthology relations

BLUR uses the first ortholog found in the BLAST result for each species, as calculated with OrthoInspector 3.0 . However, it is also possible to extend the search to the first homolog found in the BLAST result.



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