Hey Y’all!

I am so excited that Amigo is finished! I feel like it came and went so quickly! We just got Amigo and now his annotations are almost complete. Our group, Olaf’s Fan Club, divided our section of the annotations into two groups, and Sierra and I annotated the last 18 genes of Amigo’s sequence. Most of the genes we had were fairly easy to annotate. Glimmer and GeneMark called the longest ORF, all the coding potential was covered, but there were no BLAST matches. This, though somewhat disappointing that we do not know what any of those genes do, made annotating a pretty quick process. The bulk of our time was spent on the large gaps in between genes. Between a lot of genes, there were 60-100 bp gaps, which is larger than expected for a bacteriophage but too small to have a gene in between. Sierra and I decided that Amigo had a less dense genome, so it will be interesting to see if other schools had the same type of problem with their genomes. Some of the gaps were over 200 bp and had little blips of coding potential, and in those we added genes. We are not entirely sure if some of the added genes are actually valid, but we used the guidelines and tried to do what looked the best. I cannot wait to see what the other groups came up with and if we are consistent in our annotations throughout the class!

I hope everyone has a wonderful and safe spring break!

Good luck on the test tomorrow!