Bio-med PA

Bio-informatics

Feild of science that combines biology, computers, and IT to store and analyze genetic data.

Central dogma

Flow of information from DNA to protein.

How does central dogma flow

• DNA → DNA: Replication
  DNA makes a copy of itself so genetic information can be passed to new cells.

• DNA → RNA: Transcription
  A gene in DNA is copied into messenger RNA (mRNA).

• RNA → Protein: Translation
  Ribosomes read the mRNA sequence and use it to assemble a protein from amino acids.

How would you say this number 17p23.6

Chromosome 17, short arm p, band 23, sub-bend 6

How do the peaks show colors?

Green- A

Blue- C

Black- G

Red- T

Fluorescently tagged free nucleotides

A,T,G,C that have a tag attached that will illuminate under the proper setting to help identify what the end peice of the DNA fragment from thermal cycling is. They stop DNA replication/strand elongation.

BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool)

It’s a bioinformatics tool used to compare a DNA, RNA, or protein sequence to sequences in a database.

Imagine you have an unknown DNA sequence:

ATGCGTACCG...

You can put it into BLAST, and it searches databases for similar sequences.

It can help you figure out:

• What gene your sequence might come from

• What organism it may come from

• Whether your sequence is similar to a known gene/protein

• How closely related two sequences are

How to interpret BLAST results

How to interpret BLAST results

Some important things you'll see:

• % Identity → How many bases/amino acids are exactly the same.

• Query coverage → How much of your sequence matches the database sequence.

• E-value → How likely it is that the match occurred by chance. Lower is better; an E-value close to 0 is strong evidence of a meaningful match.

• Bit score → Higher generally means a better alignment.

Human Genome project

Determine the order of the 3 billion base pairs in human DNA, indentify all human genes, and store the information in freely accessable databases for later use.

Two reasons that a researcher might use a searchable DNA database

• Stored easy to access info they can use to learn about diseases

• Can help find ways to cure sicknesses and specific medicine

Law put into place to secure personal rights

Gina Act, prevents the use of insurance companies taking it to refuse coverage.