Secret messages from BLAST

Well. If I were a "single-celled, parasitic protozoan known for infections that sometimes last for years, which may be accompanied by vague gastrointestinal distress or dysentery—complete with blood and mucus in the stool", I'd feel grossly insulted by this comparison.

(I'm one to talk…"pmyers" turns up in a trypanosome.)

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Don't know if you saw this, it was on BBC:

Green pigs

The Taiwanese have transfected GFP (I assume) into pigs - and the pigs look fantastic.

I found it funny that "Condoleeza" comes up as Oryza Sativa also. She really is Condi Rice.
Subbing i for j, I too come up trypanosome.

Here's something for you Godless atheists to chew on.

Of course, if you BLAST god or jesus, you'll get no hits : there are bad letters in both. But what's a bit spooky is that if you BLAST satan, you still get no hits, even though satan is a perfectly good amino acid sequence, and the chances of a random five letter sequence is quite high.

Coinkidink? I think not! Clearly, the great Designer, who is not God, of course, certainly not, has edited all the satan out of living genomes.

Hmmm. Judging from my delicate lower intestinal digestive system, I may be suffering from President Bush.

By The Dreadful P… (not verified) on 12 Jan 2006 #permalink

Here's one you lefties will love.

In an alcohol dehydrogenase of Rubrobacter xylanophilus, there appears the sequence

reagadevil

Clearly a deletion mutant.

I put my last name in (with the U_>LI cheat) and got mostly predicted, hypothetical, and unknown proteins. Perhaps that means I have no particular destiny?

I tried this a while ago, maybe with another database though. I didn't get anything for PATRICK, but KCIRTAP had a good amount of hits.

The author could use some basic education on how to use BLAST. First, in certain cases B and U can be part of the amino acid alphabet. B can mean "asparagine or aspartate" and U can mean "selenocysteine". See here. Admittedly these don't occur often in the databases. Second, there are tricks you can use if your query is very short - using a different substitution matrix, turning off complexity filtering and so on. See here.

Of course "Satan" gets no hits! God named him "Lucifer," and LCIFER is a very common amino acid sequence. Top hit? Trypanosomes of the devilishly shifty antigens. A reflection on PZ? Also turns up in a lot of interleukins...the immune system is the work of the Lord of Lies.

Likewise "Jesus" was the earthly name of the one and only "CHRIST," which turns up a few hits. First one is the cytochrome c of geobacter metallireducens, a rust-eating bacteria used in bioremediation. Jebus the Environmentalist!

It's no wonder I read Helmintholog; as it turns out I am a Caenorhabditis elegans. That's under my pen-name, of course; in real life I am not nearly so complex, being the CFT073 strain of E. coli.

Wow - with 'Tricia', I get nice hits for the ABC transporter family protein, (Cryptosporidium parvum) AND a predicted protein similar to the EC1-V2R pheromone receptor (Mus musculus), among others. And with 'Trish' (I use Trish and Tricia equally), the first hit is PDZ/DHR/GLGF: Peptidase M61 (Methylobacillus flagellatus). Lovely to be all over the tree o' life, I think.

Cheers, Ctenotrish

By Ctenotrish (not verified) on 13 Jan 2006 #permalink

There is a lack of vowels here. Anyway, LARSSN is as expected all over the genes. The first entry wound up in Cupriavidus metallidurans, which "belongs to the phylum β-Proteobacteria and includes various isolates of soil bacteria adapted to harsh industrial biotopes". My early studies and later profession as an engineer come through clearly in the divination process. Much funnier than astrology!

By Torbjorn Larsson (not verified) on 14 Jan 2006 #permalink