Free Program Predicts How Troublesome a Genetic Mutation Is

smoothjazz writes "Researchers describe a new, freely available Web-based program called Spliceman for predicting whether genetic mutations are likely to disrupt the splicing of messenger RNA, potentially leading to disease. From the article: 'Spliceman makes its predictions about mutations by calculating that distance. It has successfully predicted the known effect of many mutations. The software has genomic information about 11 species: humans, chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, mice, rats, dogs, cats, chickens, guinea pigs, frogs, and zebra fish.'"

Comments

static code analysis tool

[vlm]

Rephrased, its a static code analysis tool for mRNA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis

Now taking bets on 10:1 odds that after posting this, some joker adds spliceman to the wiki page. Frankly it probably does belong there.

Yes, I am one of "those guys" who trys to make my perl scripts Perl::Critic compliant, in addition to running them thru perltidy. The closest thing I know of for Ruby is "laser" and I don't know a good reformatting tool for Ruby.

Re:static code analysis tool

[Samantha Wright]

That's the idea. Of course, mRNA splicing sites are way harder to find than blocks of code (the sequence is described probabilistically, in essence), and it's subtly different between species. Fortunately it's not even remotely Turing-complete; it's closer to a context-free grammar, on the level of parenthesis matching. Which is evaluated in a probabilistic order. With Turing-complete compiler macros. (It's true: all living organisms are secretly written in PL/I.)

Superpowers

[Anonymous Coward]

How long does the simulation have to run before it predicts super powers?