Conclusion of Bioinformatics

We spent more time today learning more about the same protein we've been looking at all week. Basically we wanted to find out which chromosome its gene is on, which we did. We also found out which genes were its nearest neighbors. From what we can tell based on the gene maps we had, none of the neighboring genes overlaps with the one we were looking at. After we looked at the human version, we went and looked at the same gene in mice. It turns out that the gene neighbors are the same in mice as they are in humans, except that the order on the DNA was reversed. This apparently means that the gene is on the opposite strand of DNA in mice versus in humans. Today was our last day of bioinformatics, and I am seriously glad. I can appreciate the importance of bioinformatics, and it's good that some people want to do it. But I'm not planning to be one of them ever again!

The rest of the day was pretty long for me. Our journal club articles were both on Marfan syndrome. That is a genetic disorder of a protein in the extracellular matrix called fibrillin. I'm not really sure what Marfan syndrome has to do with bioinformatics, but it was interesting to read about nonetheless. I went to the lab in the afternoon, and I didn't wind up finishing my work until about 8:30. After that I was pretty much ready to just go home and crash.