Dumb Things With Bioinformatics

PrvtBurrito writes: "About 3% of the human genome is "coded" as genes. The proteins those genes encode can be represented as long sequences of amino acids, a twenty letter alphabet. In an attempt to perhaps prove that nothing is sacred, someone has cataloged all of the english words found in known annotated protein sequences from many organisms. It looks like after cataloging over 37,000,000 characters, the longest word is chapstick and the most common word is kilter."

Comments

Amino Acids

[oregon]

The 20 letters are

a Alanine
r Arginine
n Asparagine
d Aspartic acid
c Cysteine
q Glutamine
e Glutamic acid
g Glycine
h Histidine
i Isoleucine
l Leucine
k Lysine
m Methionine
f Phenylalanine
p Proline
s Serine
t Threonine
w Tryptophan
y Tyrosine
v Valine

Let's copyright them.

[clarkie.mg]

Like the aussies who copyrighted ringing tones, someone should copyright those sequences.

Patent on DNA material is already there, so let's go one step further with proteins.

Right there

[heikkile]

near the beginning of chromosome 1, in plain view for anyone to read: Frst Post

Do it yourself

[meiocyte]

Here's a link to check whatever protein sequence you want against the human genome. Make sure to select "blastp" (for protein sequences) in the pulldown menu. Use the alphabet provided above.. it will find near matches too. Enjoy..