Nandana Madhusoodanan, Fábio Madeira, Ania Niewielska, Tariq Sulaiman Fazil Ahamed, Leeroy M Ncube, Timothy Porter
The rapid growth of biological sequence data has increased the need for easy, accessible, and scalable tools for sequence comparison and analysis. The EMBL-EBI Job Dispatcher framework helps meet this need by providing a single web-based platform that offers many commonly used tools, including the BLAST, Clustal Omega, and EMBOSS programs. In this article, we provide a practical, easy-to-follow guide to the main tool categories available in Job Dispatcher, focusing on multiple sequence alignment and sequence similarity search. We present step-by-step workflows that demonstrate how to run these analyses directly on the web without installing any bioinformatics software. Our goal is to provide a simple, practical reference for researchers and students new to bioinformatics, helping them choose the right tools and use web-based analysis effectively. © 2026 EMBL-EBI. Current Protocols published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. Basic Protocol 1: Sequence similarity search using FASTA Basic Protocol 2: Sequence similarity search using NCBI BLAST+ Basic Protocol 3: Sequence similarity search using PSI-BLAST Basic Protocol 4: Multiple sequence alignment using Clustal Omega Basic Protocol 5: Visualizing multiple sequence alignments using MView Basic Protocol 6: Workflow from BLAST results to Clustal Omega to MView.