The crossword solution for the term 'BLAST ALTERNATIVE' is DRAT. DRAT stands for 'Discriminatory Restriction of Alignment Tool', which is a bioinformatics software tool used to identify and analyze conserved regions in DNA sequences. It is an ALTERNATIVE to the BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) algorithm, which is used to compare biological sequences. DRAT is more accurate than BLAST and can be used to identify conserved regions in DNA sequences that are not detected by BLAST.