BLAST^®  allows you to download a file containing information on your search strategy that you can share. This article provides steps (A) to download a search-strategy file from BLAST. It further provides (B) your collaborators/students with steps to upload the file back to BLAST to access your search strategy.  

A. Downloading search-strategy file from BLAST (Figure 1):

• Set up and conduct a BLAST search. 
• Upon successfully completing the search, click the Recent Results tab at the top-right of any BLAST page.
• On the Recent Results page, click the download link in the search row you want to share. This downloads a machine-readable file with the “.asn “ extension to your download directory.
• Send the unaltered file to your recipients.

Figure 1: The Recent Results BLAST page with the download link (boxed in red) for an example BLAST search.

B. Uploading a search strategy file to BLAST by its recipient (Figure 2):

• Click the Saved Strategies tab, at the upper-right side of any BLAST page.
• On the Saved Strategies page, click the Choose File button to select the file from your local disk.
• Click the blue View button to display the search page with the saved settings, including the query sequence(s).

Figure 2: The Saved Search Strategies BLAST page for uploading search-strategy files. Upon the file upload, the View button (boxed in red) leads to the BLAST search page with the embedded search strategy, including the query sequence.