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.

back      continue