4.3.19 Next Steps of Independent Research Project

Rationale: After the brief intermission to practice presentations, the class returned to our independent research projects. Therefore, my group spent time furthering our understanding of repeats and making an outline to organize our group project.

Tools/Procedure: Gepard, DNA Master, Clustal Omega, Phamerator, NCBI BLAST

I focused my attention on browsing through literature, Gepard, and DNA Master to find repeats that could potentially be of significance. I took sequences from different genes, converted them to FASTA files, and used Gepard to visualize a dot plot that would reveal any potential repeated sequences that could have been of interest.

Results: One long repeat of 51 base pairs was found to be intriguing and effort and time was spent to find the significance. We have concluded that it is conserved across members of the AM cluster and it is close to tail proteins, but more investigating needs to be done to fully determine the purpose of this long repeat.

Conclusions: The problem of finding repeats has proved to be mostly solvable, so our topic for the project appears to be intact. More investigation will be needed to figure out whether this conjecture is true or false.

Next Steps: Members of the group will be investigating the repeat independently to gain knowledge and to investigate potential reasoning for why it is there before the next lab period.