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.

More like this

Know what sounds like fun? Testing almost 5,000 bats and over 4,000 rodents, from all over the world, for a cadre of viral infections ;) Im not kidding!
Part II. What do mumps proteins do? And how do we find out?
Part IV. Assembling the details and making the case for a novel paramyxovirus
Part I. The back story from the genome record Together, these five posts describe the discovery of a novel paramyxovirus in the Aedes aegyptii genome and a new method for finding interesting anomalies in GenBank.