Application Exam Questions

   

Bioinformatics and computational biology are huge and growing areas of active research with a dynamic array of subspecialities - phylogenetic analysis has advanced in leaps and bounds with the availablity of molecular data, genomic-, transcriptomic-, proteomic and other cross-sectional views are slowly beginning to unravel some of the intricacies of the cell's inner workings, predictive models for molecular medicine and bioengineering may help shape our society's future. These tasks are what motivates bioinformatics worldwide, seeking to develp novel ways to reason about biology.

   

2003 - Consequences of Homology

A bacterial genome has been sequenced. Comparison with tRNA synthetase COGs has failed to turn up an annotation for a Glutaminyl tRNA synthetase gene. Assume that the genome sequence is complete, has been assembled without frameshift errors and all gene models are correct. The sequence for Glutaminyl tRNA synthetase has not simply been overlooked. Answer the following questions briefly.

• What is a COG ?

  State two reasons why the endpoint of a biochemical pathway could be present in an organism but a gene on the pathway would fail to be found in a COG analysis.

  Briefly(!) state what wet-lab experiments you would propose to confirm (or disprove) the hypotheses you have stated above ?

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2002

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