12. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides a wide array of bioinformatics tools. What is the primary function of the widely used software BLAST?
(A) To predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence by comparing it to structures in the Protein Data Bank.
(B) To assemble short, overlapping DNA fragments from a sequencing project into a single continuous genome sequence.
(C) To compare a user-submitted DNA or protein sequence against the entire GenBank database to find sequences with a similar local alignment.
(D) To identify all functional elements in a genome, including enhancers, promoters, and noncoding RNA genes, as was done in the ENCODE project.
(E) To construct an evolutionary tree by comparing the entire genomes of multiple species and calculating their divergence times.