Digital Biology Friday: Let's go on a treasure hunt!

Let's play anomaly!

Most of this week, I've written about the fun time I had playing around with NCBI's Blink database and finding evidence that at least one mosquito, Aedes aegypti, seems to have been infected at some point with a plant paramyxovirus and that the paramyxovirus left one of its genes behind, stuck in the mosquito genome.

During this process, I realized that the method I used works with other viruses, too. I tried it with a few random viruses and sure enough, I found some interesting things.

You've got a week to give it a try. Let's see what you find! The method is described here and you can look at my work with the mumps virus to see an example.

Give it a try and post your results, if you like, - the virus, the gene, and the weird thing you found, in the comments. I'll take a look - in a week or so and see if there's anything more you can do to add to what you've found.

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Part IV. Assembling the details and making the case for a novel paramyxovirus This is the fourth in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in a mosquito. In this part, we take a look at all the evidence we can find and try to figure out how a gene from a virus came to be…
Part II. What do mumps proteins do? And how do we find out? This is the second in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes, and a general method for finding interesting things. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do? And…
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