The July issue of CSH Protocols is available and features a set of articles detailing the basics for common Bioinformatics techniques (and just in time for the 4th of July, allowing me to make a “blast” pun).

Many come from David Mount, author of the widely used Bioinformatics: Sequence and Genome Analysis textbook. These include articles on the use of BLAST (here also) and FASTA (here also), as well as general strategies for sequence similarity searches. Also this month you’ll find protocols from Patrick Schnable’s group detailing the extraction and amplification of DNA for use in genotyping, and techniques for SNP mining 454 EST sequences.

The BLAST article and the 454 article are our featured protocols this month, and are freely available without a subscription.