Welcome to BioBIKE's tutorial
What is a Gene?
What determines the end of a gene?
Flush with success at learning how a gene begins (if not what precedes a gene), you must be raring to figure out how genes end as well. Well, don't let me stop you!
Consider your successful strategy to characterize the beginning of a gene. First, you isolated the beginning of one gene and then generalized the method to work on all genes. Then you examined the beginning sequences and identified a pattern. Then you tested different hypotheses concerning the pattern.
- Here's a function that can get you the last 10 nucleotides on either side of the end of the gene pro0029:
Try it out,... does it work? How can you test it for consistency?
- Once you're satisfied, modify it to get you each sequence near the ends of all the genes of ss120. What do you notice?
- Use the tricks you learned in Section B to try to figure out what marks the end of the gene. As before, quantitate how many genes have the suspected terminating elements.
- What about noncoding genes? How do they end?
PROBLEM 6:
What conclusions do you reach regarding how genes end?
PROBLEM 7:
To what degree are signals universal? Examine other organisms (e.g.,compare ss120) and determine whether they agree as to signals on how to begin and end genes.
That's it!
But if you were able to accomplish
all this with such scanty instruction,
then you're able to work quite independently!
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