About PLAN

Personal BLAST Navigator (PLAN) is a generic web application for automation of high-throughput BLAST searches, as well as organizing, managing and mining large-scale BLAST results. Currently, the features of PLAN include

• Project-based data organization;
• Integration with sequence database;
• Integration with high efficient, hardware-based BLAST search for high-throughput analysis;
• Integration with GO annotation;
• Alignment visualization;
• Filtering by match score and e-value;
• Search by accession, name and description.
• Management of queries/targets of personal interests through favorites;
• Statistical overview by query, target, gene line and plate (if applicable);
• Batch export of selected queries / targets for various purposes.

Applications of PLAN include, but are not limited to:

• Visualization of large scale sequence mapping (such as gene code regions mapped to genome sequences);
• High-throughput sequence annotation based on BLAST search;
• Functional categorization of sequences based on GO annotation;
• Identification of gene mutants (e.g. from large-scale insertion/deletion/silencing experiments) with respect to gene lines;
• Identification of unique/common sets of two sequence sets (venn diagram);

PLAN also can be easily integrated into other web applications for the visualization of BLAST alignment. Click here for a demonstration on how to display the alignment in a single web page.

PLAN is being actively developed and the functions are being expanded. We appreciate your bug reports, comments, and suggestions.



We welcome any public, uncommercial use of our server. However, due to limited computer resource, it is not practical to keep all data forever.

Public (Anonymous) Projects: All anonymous public projects, which are initially created under the "Public Projects" tab and are not associated with particular email address/owners, will be kept for at least seven (7) days since creation. After this retention period, they are subject to deletion without notice upon our sole discretion.

Personal Projects: We work hard to keep all personal projects under all registered accounts for as long as we can. We won't delete these personal projects without the consent of the corresponding account owners. Personal projects are initially created under the "Personal Projects" tab after a registered user logs in. These also include "published" personal projects, which belong to a registered account and are shared to the public, and shown in the list of "Shared Personal Projects". For the convenience of future correspondence, please register with an email address which you may access daily.


This web server is scheduled to reboot everyday at midnight 00:00AM CST. Our hardware-based BLAST server is scheduled to reboot every Sunday at midnight 00:00AM CST. Please avoid initiating time consuming operations around these time points. Other scheduled system maintenances will be announced in advance.


High-throughput analysis of large-scale data requires intensive computational and networking resources. To take advantage of your locally institional resources, and for a more flexible customization (such as your own plug-ins and BLAST databases), we strongly encourage you to locally deploy PLAN system. We will provide full support on the installation, customization, and maintenance of PLAN to all research-orientated, non-commercial users.

To download the PLAN source code, click here.


Our manuscript on PLAN has been published in BMC Bioinformatics. The citation and BibTEX record below is for your use in your related manuscript.

@ARTICLE{he07plan,
    Author         = {Ji He and Xinbin Dai and Xuechun Zhao},
    Journal        = {BMC Bioinformatics},
    Title          = {{PLAN}: A web platform for automating high-throughput BLAST 
                      searches and for managing and mining results},
    Year           = {2007},
    Volume         = {8},
    Pages          = {53}
}

2007/02/02 - Check out the new GO categorization function! We have release the GO annotation and categorization function for beta test. Please find the "GO Annotation/Categorization (BETA)" link from the left-side navigation bar once you login to your project. In order to do GO annotation/categorization, you will have to do a BLAST search against a database that has been annotated with GO (e.g. the GO sequence database we provided).

Also, check out the new data export function which offers more flexible options at a higher speed.

Public Projects

Public projects are open to all visitors and have a short retentive period. Any one may create a new public project, and view, modify and even delete a existing public project. Public projects are good for "take a look and leave" data.

To create a public project, please repeat the 4 digits that you see below, and click the "Create" button: 7464     (key in the 4 digits you see on the left) For easy identification, you may want to customize the project description. Description (Optional): Public project

List of All Public Projects
31364	2008-09-04 06:47:11	Public project
31363	2008-09-04 06:40:32	Public project
31356	2008-08-25 10:18:48	Public project
31350	2008-08-22 05:16:25	Public project
31337	2008-08-18 10:59:27	Public project
31335	2008-08-14 20:54:23	Public project
31331	2008-08-12 23:55:17	Public project
31261	2008-07-15 05:02:13	Public project
31249	2008-07-10 14:44:52	Public project
31246	2008-07-09 05:46:19	Public project
31189	2008-06-26 10:40:19	Public project
31171	2008-06-24 13:42:24	Public project
31151	2008-06-22 00:27:19	Public project
31150	2008-06-21 22:18:31	Public project
31146	2008-06-20 11:20:08	Public project
31120	2008-06-16 10:45:25	Public project
31118	2008-06-16 02:21:08	Public project
31115	2008-06-09 15:52:27	Public project
31106	2008-06-05 22:41:37	Public project
31094	2008-06-02 06:31:36	Public project
31093	2008-06-02 01:53:33	Public project
31092	2008-06-01 21:24:29	Public project
31091	2008-05-30 02:29:52	Public project
31084	2008-05-26 05:32:20	Public project
31076	2008-05-21 15:06:19	May21Switchgrass LCM VB assembly
31068	2008-05-19 10:12:32	Public project
31061	2008-05-15 05:25:45	Public project
31038	2008-05-07 09:01:08	Public project
31004	2008-04-24 12:44:09	Public project
30996	2008-04-17 00:03:17	Public project
30994	2008-04-16 05:20:01	Public project
30991	2008-04-14 13:36:57	Public project
30990	2008-04-11 15:39:13	Public project
30986	2008-04-10 10:49:57	Public project
30984	2008-04-10 03:16:44	Public project
30982	2008-04-08 11:43:33	Public project
30966	2008-04-07 14:28:08	Public project
30957	2008-04-07 09:09:57	Public project
30952	2008-04-04 14:04:15	Public project
30945	2008-04-01 19:58:36	Public project
30897	2008-03-20 04:02:33	Public project
30879	2008-03-11 02:04:07	Public project
30878	2008-03-11 01:04:01	Public project
30877	2008-03-11 01:03:42	Public project
30850	2008-02-20 10:34:14	Public project
30849	2008-02-19 15:58:10	Public project
30847	2008-02-19 03:32:00	Public project
30838	2008-02-13 20:27:04	Public project
30833	2008-02-04 13:05:35	Public project
30820	2008-01-27 09:17:32	Public project
30812	2008-01-17 04:19:56	Public project
30810	2008-01-16 15:45:24	Public project
30809	2008-01-16 15:26:22	Public project
30808	2008-01-16 09:59:40	Public project
30807	2008-01-16 09:49:21	Public project
30806	2008-01-15 15:00:46	Public project
30805	2008-01-15 14:57:07	Public project
30798	2008-01-11 15:15:06	Public project
30786	2008-01-09 01:04:07	Public project
30711	2007-11-21 16:38:42	Public project
30710	2007-11-21 15:17:14	Public project
30709	2007-11-21 15:14:42	Public project
30689	2007-11-05 11:20:05	Public project
30682	2007-10-28 12:41:02	Public project
30660	2007-10-04 15:01:05	Public project
30637	2007-08-28 12:30:48	Public project
30636	2007-08-28 12:22:57	Public project
30635	2007-08-28 12:21:11	Public project
30632	2007-08-28 08:06:15	Public project
30631	2007-08-28 07:13:04	Public project
30630	2007-08-27 20:12:45	Public project
30591	2007-07-30 13:10:26	Public project
30574	2007-07-24 13:43:15	Public project
30562	2007-07-11 11:25:42	Public project
30509	2007-06-21 05:28:53	Public project
30500	2007-06-11 22:46:56	Public project
30496	2007-06-08 20:01:40	Public project
30433	2007-06-05 05:41:59	Public project
30409	2007-06-01 08:11:39	Public project
30384	2007-05-09 02:51:20	Public project
30382	2007-05-08 08:52:32	Public project
30381	2007-05-08 08:46:47	Public project
30380	2007-05-08 08:18:03	Public project
30377	2007-05-07 10:34:00	Public project
30376	2007-05-07 10:31:00	Public project
30374	2007-05-06 12:19:11	Public project
30346	2007-04-25 10:14:24	Public project
30311	2007-04-17 09:03:48	Public project
30215	2007-03-12 03:36:11	Public project
30205	2007-03-07 11:59:54	Public project
30203	2007-03-07 04:20:22	Public project

Shared Personal Projects

List of All Shared Personal Projects
31248	2008-07-10 10:54:00	D3r mistery
31240	2008-07-07 12:52:28	wetoccam_D
31239	2008-07-07 12:51:48	wetoccam_C
31238	2008-07-07 12:51:07	wetoccam_B
31237	2008-07-07 12:49:58	wetoccam_A
31130	2008-06-18 10:06:34	Noble Foundation Tnt1 insertional FSTs as of 06/18/2008 (Read-only)
31000	2008-04-21 11:29:06	Blast TF equences against Rice Genome V5
30944	2008-04-01 16:59:33	Blast 1531 unique Switchgrass genomic equences against Rice Genome V5 (Read-only)
30502	2007-06-14 14:52:32	Brassica rapa unigenes (Read-only)
30434	2007-06-05 13:16:40	Project created by givans at cgrb.oregonstate.edu (Read-only)
30406	2007-05-24 15:11:09	Annotation of Lupinus albus root ESTs (LRT), ESTs are exported from ESTAP, unigenes are assembled with NEST-PIPE (Read-only)
30401	2007-05-22 15:53:38	wnt5 traslation (Read-only)
30134	2007-02-09 16:42:23	Switchgrass Unigenes (assembled from 11, 990 ESTs Downloaded from NCBI EST database on 01-20-2007, ID range: DN140629-DN152624, missing six IDs) (Read-only)
30126	2007-02-01 09:54:19	Noble Foundation Tnt1 Medicago truncatula FSTs. Support to manuscript submission "Large scale insertion mutagenesis using Tnt1 retrotransposon in the model legume Medicago truncatula" Special Note: Some "|" bars (used to indicate perfect matches) in the BLASTN alignment results are missing. This is a known software bug in the TimeLogic hardware BLAST solution. It is confirmed that those missing bars do not affect the correctness of the alignment (incl. scores and e-values), i.e. they are just some mistakes in the visualization level. (Read-only)
30119	2007-01-03 14:28:01	NF : Udvardi : MTGI v8 ESTs and IMGAG 20060717 proteins BLASTX/BLASTP against TAIR 6 20060907 proteins for putative Mt <> At Ortholog discovery (Updated with latest sequences) (Read-only)
30117	2006-12-27 15:43:14	NF : Microarray : IMGAG 20060717 and MTGI v8 BLASTN Against Affy Mt Target Sequences for Mt Gene ID <> Mt Affy Probe Sets ID Mapping (Read-only)
30085	2006-08-16 11:30:46	NF : Dixon : Guar Unigenes (Early & Late Seeds) (Read-only)
30068	2006-07-07 16:39:38	NF : Microarray : TAIR6 Arabidopsis Gene CDs 20060907 BLASTN against Arab Affy gene chip sequences for Arab Gene ID <> Arab Affy probe sets ID mapping (Updated with new TAIR sequences) (Read-only)
30060	2006-06-29 11:56:43	Annotation of the Centaurea EST library. Reference: Amanda K Broz, Corey D Broeckling, Ji He, Xinbin Dai, Patrick X Zhao, Jorge M Vivanco, "A first step in understanding an invasive weed through its genes: an EST analysis of invasive Centaurea maculosa", BMC Plant Biology 2007, 7:25. (Read-only)
30058	2006-06-15 15:51:17	NF : Microarray : Yuhong's Affimetrix gene chip sequences blastx against GO seq for GO annotation (Read-only)
30032	2006-02-14 09:59:50	NF : Microarray : Yuhong's Affimetrix gene chip sequences blastn against mtgi various versions (Read-only)

My Personal Projects

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