### Description

This column shows the `blastp` E-value (expectation value) between each gene and the selected gene. The greater the similarity of two proteins, the lower the E-value is. Identical long proteins have an E-value of zero.

Formally, an E-value is the number of other known genes that are expected to have at least this level of homology by chance. An E-value of less than 0.1 can be safely interpreted as the probability that a match this good would occur merely by chance.

### Method

All known splice variants of all known $organism genes are put into a `blast` protein database using the `formatdb` program. This database is then searched with each known gene using version 2.2.5 of the NCBI `blastall` program with the following flags:

     -p blastp -e 0.01 -m 8 -b 1000

These flags tell the program to do a protein-based search and report up to 1000 hits of E-value 0.01 or better in a tab-delimited format. The output of this search is loaded into the Gene Sorter database.

### Action

Click on a gene's E-value to display an alignment between the gene and the selected (highlighted) gene.