DNA sequence analysis
"Digital biology," as I use the phrase, refers to the idea of using digital information for doing biology. This digital information comes from multiple sources such as DNA sequences, protein sequences, DNA hybridization, molecular structures, analytical chemistry, biomarkers, images, GIS, and more. We obtain this information either from experiments or from a wide variety of databases and we work with this information using several kinds of bioinformatics tools.
The reason I'm calling this field "digital biology" and not "bioinformatics" (even though I typically use the terms as…
During the past few Fridays (or least here and here), we've been looking at a paper that was published from China with some Β-lactamase sequences that were supposedly from Streptococcus pneumoniae. The amazing thing about these particular sequences is that Β-lactamase has never been seen in S. pneumoniae before, making this a rather significant (and possibly scary) discovery.
If it's correct.
tags: DNA sequence analysis, antiobiotic resistance , microbiology, blastn
The way this sequence was identified as Β-lactamase was through a blastn search at the NCBI. And in fact, it was correct to…