There Are Several Programs That Allow Researchers to Search DNA

question 4

Essay

There are several programs that allow researchers to search DNA databases with a newly acquired DNA sequence.One program,BLAST (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/),allows researchers to compare their sequence with all publicly available sequences.The search engine returns a list of similar sequences,with an estimate of similarity score (the greater the similarity between two sequences,the larger the score),and reveals the function of these similar sequences (if known).Suppose that you have just cloned and sequenced a gene from a gorilla,but you do not know what it does in a cell.You do a BLAST search using your gorilla sequence.Some of the output from the search is shown below:

a)What is the likely function of the gorilla gene?
b)Why does the output include sequences from species other than gorilla?
c)Why are some sequences more similar than others?

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