Murder at the Airport
Exercise 6:
The database record for casa1_bovin contains everything you need to know to answer the four questions about your protein:
- Which protein is it? (Protein name)
- From which organism does it originate? (From)
- What is the function of this protein?
- Is this protein “guilty”? Could it be responsible for the death of the tourist? Why (not)?
Exercise 7: Now analyze the other 3 suspicious proteins by yourself!
Run a BLAST search with the sequences of the other 3 proteins and write down your results. Here you can find the other amino acid sequences.
What is your final conclusion about the murder? How did the victim die?
A closer look
You have now learned quite a lot about a particular field of bioinformatics: the analysis of protein sequences using bioinformatics tools and databases.
But there is more to bioinformatics than just working with sequences. In 3D drug design we will look at the 3D structures of proteins and look for an antidote against the venom.