BSCI 410 
Molecular Genetics 
Fall 2008  

Questions about Homework 2.

The following are questions and answers from students regarding Homework 2 (2008). Each question is offset with a horizontal line.

There was a typo in the homework as distributed. The corrected questions are as follows:

10. (2 points) The human U1A protein (NP_004587) binds U1 snRNA while the homologous human U2B'' protein (NP_003083) bindsU2 snRNA. What is the evidence for this statement ? *

11. (6 points in four parts) In some species there is a single homolog for U1A and U2B''. An example is Drosophila melanogaster ).
(1 point) What is the refseq accession number for the Drosophila protein that is homologous to both?
(1 point) Does this protein bind U1 snRNA, U2 snRNA or both?
(2 points) What is the evidence for this statement ? *
(2 points) Make an alignment of these three proteins (e.g. with clustalw). Attach your result.

Several people had questions about BLAST searches. Please be careful to check your Database and Organism selections to match what you want to do.

For question 3 it says to provide the human gene name in the form of ABC1, so does that mean that the gene has a code name that consists of three letters and one number?

I was just trying to say that I wanted the formal gene name.   For yeast there is always three letters and a number.  For humans, there is often more than three letters.   Examples of human gene names are HSD17B2 , EMX2 , SFRP4 , LEFTY2.  

Also, for question 7 can a gene have more than one map position?

At the end of the hw2 print out, there is a sentence saying that I have to "provide the primary literature and description of the experiment that makes the point" but only source I've used was the NCBI website. My question is how can I show the sources that I used. In what format do you want me to provide the source?

I asked you to find a primary source, which means an article that presents new data (or data that was new at the time).  PubMed is great for finding the source, but you need to read the source itself: download it (or read the full text online) and identify the key experiments that provide evidence for the stated claim.   Describe those experiments.  I'm not that concerned about the format of your citation so long as it is unambiguous, including author, journal, year and enough information for it to be uniquely identified (PubMed ID is useful). 

The following page from our library might be useful:
http://www.lib.umd.edu/MCK/bsci223.html#scholar

So might this page (from Swarthmore):
http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/litsearch.htm .