### Description

This column shows the bit score measure of protein similarity between a gene and the selected gene. The greater the similarity between two proteins, the higher the bit score.

### 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 indicate to 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 from this search is loaded into the Gene Sorter database.