Question

You’ve been provided with the complete nucleotide sequence for the domestic dog pancreatic amylase AMY2B gene. Explain how you would search for and locate a homologous gene in the Fennec fox, assuming it has had its genome sequenced. Describe how you would obtain the original amylase protein, from each test specimen without obtaining it from the dog or Fennec fox directly (no blood, tissue or serum draws), and test it for comparative activity between the domestic dog and the Fennec fox. (Note, no field work or hands-on work with live dogs or Fennec foxes).

Answer 1

Answer to above question

Above mentioned task can be performed with the help of Bioinformatics tools which directly deals with solving biological problems with the help of computer tools.Basically bioinformatics combines biology, computer science, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret the biological data.

To name few tools of bioinformatics they are -

NCBI contains a series of databases relevant to biotechnology and biomedicine. It is an important resource for bioinformatics tools and services. Major databasesof NCBI include GenBank for DNA sequences and PubMed, a bibliographic database for the biomedical literature.

HomoloGene, is a tool of the United States National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), is a system for automated detection of homologs among the annotated (different) genes of several completely sequenced eukaryotic genomes.

BLAST stands for (basic local alignment search tool) is an algorithm and program for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of proteins or the nucleotides of DNA and/or RNA sequences. BLAST search helps a researcher to compare a subject protein or nucleotide sequence (called a query) with a library or database of sequences, and identify library sequences that resemble the query sequence above a certain value

Now combining all the above mentioned tools we can find out the answer of question in the described way below - Here we have nucleotide sequence which can be easily retrieved from NCBI for a particular gene like in this case we have pancreatic amylase AMY2B gene.To locate a homologus gene in Fennec Fox we can use Homologene Tool from NCBI where we will get homologous gene to AMY2B in Fennec Fox.Now using BLAST tool we can obtain information about original amylase protein and we can also used BLAST tool for comparative activity of amylase protein in Domestic Dog and Fennec Fox .Result of above tools will clearly provide answers of question in much short span of time as compared to lab -based activities,