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Research simulations - Scenarios
Scenario 1 | 2 | 3
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| 6
The gene that must be there isn't
The standard way of comparing the sequence against others is to
run the sequence through the non-redundant (NR) sequences in GenBank,
using the Blast facility at NCBI
. You do this,
and much to your surprise you get the result displayed by clicking
here.
You don't get any hits to Bacillus. You don't even get any hits
to bacteria. All you get are nonsensical hits to the human genome.
Of course the E-values are all close to 1, which means that these
hits could easily have arisen by chance. This is clearly noise.
This result doesn't make sense! This region of the lef gene is
highly conserved. With all the attention given to anthrax, there
must be dozens of versions of the gene in GenBank. If PCR picked
up the fragment, then Blast should have picked it up too. |
