blast

blast

 [blast]

1. an immature stage in cellular development before appearance of the definitive characteristics of the cell; used also as a word termination, as in ameloblast and trophoblast.

blast cell.

2. the wave of air pressure produced by the detonation of high-explosive bombs or shells or by other explosions; it causes pulmonary damage and hemorrhage (lung blast, blast chest), laceration of other thoracic and abdominal viscera, ruptured eardrums, and effects in the central nervous system.

Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. © 2003 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.

blast

(blast),

General term for immature or precursor cell.

[G. blastos, germ]

Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary © Farlex 2012

BLAST

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. A nucleic acid- and protein-sequence comparison algorithm which is used to find matches in gene sequences and to search sequence databases for optimal local alignments to a query sequence.

BLAST uses a heuristic algorithm, seeking local alignments and creating a matrix of similarity scores for all possible pairs of residues, defining high-scoring segments, statistically evaluating the significance of the results and detecting relationships among sequences which share only isolated regions of similarity.

Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All rights reserved.

blast

noun Hematology A general term for a primitive blood cell. See Blast cell, Blast crisis.

McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

blast

(blast)

General term for immature or precursor cell.

[G. blastos, germ]

Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing © Farlex 2012

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool)

a sequence comparison algorithm used to search DNA or PROTEIN databases. For example, BLASTN is used for homology searching to compare nucleotide sequences.

The query sequence is entered and compared with a nucleotide sequence database.

Collins Dictionary of Biology, 3rd ed. © W. G. Hale, V. A. Saunders, J. P. Margham 2005

blast

(blast)

General term for immature or precursor cell.

[G. blastos, germ]

Medical Dictionary for the Dental Professions © Farlex 2012