Personal Projects
Return to Bioinformatics
Combined project!
Making life easier for a researcher: A case study
A crime scene investigator, Dr. Doolittle, is called to the scene of a gruesome murder. As he pulls into the Chicago zoo, Dr. Doolittle finds the mane attraction, a large African male lion, lying in a pool of blood. The zookeeper has isolated several suspects who were found near the scene and also covered with blood: a chimpanzee, river buffalo, opposum, platypus, and rat. The lion has unfortunately been so maimed during the attack that it is difficult to tell whether the cause of death was strangulation, crushing, or biting. Fortunately Dr. Doolittle knows that that all of the suspects' genomes have been sequenced and so he collects a sample of the blood at the scene to take back to the lab.
Dr. Doolittle centrifuges this blood sample separating it into white blood cells, buffy coat and plasma. Subsequently, he lyses the red blood cells in the plasma and extracts the total RNA. Using advance sequencing techniques, he obtains the following strand of RNA:
For this step, we will need to design a program for ourselves to reverse translate this protein sequence into a strand of mRNA to provide the students with in the case study.
protein:
VHLSGGEKSAVTNLWGKVNINELGGEALGRLLVVYPWTQRFFEAFGDLSSAGAVMGNPKV
KAHGAKVLTSFGDALKNLDDLKGTFAKLSELHCDKLHVDPENFNRLGNVLIVVLARHFSK
DFSPEVQAAWQKLVSGVAHALGHKYH
Translate this RNA sequence into an amino acid sequence and find out to which protein it corresponds by performing a BLAST search at http://services.uniprot.org/blast/
