BIO306 Genetics: Lab#1 Assignment (5 points)

RETRIEVING YOUR FRUIT FLY GENE SEQUENCE
Visit the following link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/

Be sure that the pull-down menu next to “Search” is on “Gene”.

Then type in “Drosophila melanogaster *****” where ***** is the name of the gene that you are working with and hit “Go”.

(If you have two genes, you will do this process for each of your genes).

NOTE: If you have the Bar mutation, type in BarH1.

You will retrieve the most relevant links that match your query.

Scroll through the list and look for the one that has the same symbol as your gene mutation (as written on your fly vial or found in the fly manual). Be sure that this hit also has Drosophila melanogaster listed.

For example, this is NOT correct for the white gene because it has the wrong gene symbol:

and this is not correct because it isn’t from Drosophila melanogaster (it is from Homo sapiens and it has the wrong gene symbol):

Once you have found the correct gene and organism, click on the blue gene symbol and you will be sent to another page containing information about your gene. Scroll to the bottom and look for a region of the page that resembles the following:

Go to the section entitled “NCBI Reference Sequences (RefSeq)” and click on the first accession number (an “NM” number) that immediately follows the words “mRNA and Protein(s)” (highlighted in red in the example above). This will take you to yet another page that contains information about the gene sequence, including publications regarding the original sequencers of the gene, other features of the gene that we will not deal with at this time, possibly a protein translation of the gene using single letter amino acid abbreviations (in capital letters), and a nucleic acid sequence in small letters (acgt). Highlight the entire nucleic acid sequence, and then copy it.

Paste your sequence into a Microsoft Word file and give the document a name that reflects the gene sequence that it contains (e.g., apterous). Deposit this file into the appropriate dropbox on D2L.
If you have two different mutations, you must repeat this process to find the second gene and deposit it into the dropbox as a Word file as well.

SAVE A COPY OF YOUR FILES as you will need these sequences later in the semester!