h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello all you proper-scientist-types out there. I have a bit of an odd query, that's not really asking for something to be explained at all. But it would help a lay wannabe out.

Would any of you happen to have access to the cytochrome c sequences for some unusual organisms - some beetles and some cnidarians (corals, jellyfish, etc) would be perfect, but any non-vertebrates would be good. I mean the actual amino acid sequences, as in: GDVEKG... etc.

For instance:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l4dfmcjlx9ye3xk6/

This paper looks perfect, but I'd have to pay (a lot) to access it. Google has found me a few, but tends to get bogged down with (a) pay sites and (b) cyt c oxidase 1 subunit (which is a different molecule entirely I think).

Gif

Hi Giford

I have downloaded the article through Athens (Keele Uni). Do you want me to email it to you? It is a 1.4MB pdf.

t.

That'd be brilliant - it's giford[&]hotmail.[uk.co] with the 2 obvious changes removed!

Gif

OK. On it's way!! Enjoy.

t.

If what was the case when I was a student, is still the case now; any sequences of genes done in published studies should all be submitted to the online freely accessible database ... err think it may be called genbank, I'll go see if I can find it in my favorites...

here is some information on genbank:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/
on that page also is the ways to search the database.
If what you want to do is along the lines of aligning differnt sequences of the same gene from differnt organisms, there are automated, free tools on there as well to do that, err I'l have to look to see how its done now, but i think its the one called 'BLAST' or somethign which will allign the sequences, I seem to recall you only need the accession numbers (each unique DNA sequence in the genbank database has a unique accession (like a serial number) number, I seem to recall once you've searched genbank directly, found lal the differnt species version of the genes, you get all the accession numbers and then put these into the BLAST (or other allignment softwware), and it alligns them for you; there are differnt parameters to do with the allignment, but its been so long since I used this I can't remember much about them.... but basically they're all fairly easy to use, and you can search with varying the parameters and such like...
there are also other bits of software, probably mostly foudn on that site, which are also free, for doing things like searching for transcription factor binding sites (that is mainly what I used it for in my masters research), plus also for things like finding the start of genes in longer sequences, etc...
(I alligned the chimp gorilla, mouse human orangutang and some other species versions of the
t TNF alpha promoter region, plus multiple differnt human versions of the promoter, then searching the promoter for transcription factor binding sites, tryign* to identify those transcription factor binding sites that were relaly* important (which should be more retained between species), and then trying to hope these matched with known sites of promotoer polymorphisms that have known associations with human diseases)
It all seems so long ago now

Thanks Turvy.

2legs, I've found that database already - but there's so much info I'm having trouble identifying beetles among all the cyt c results. I've tried searching by cytochrome c + [various beetle clades] but all I get is thousands of cyt c oxidase subunit 1 results.

Gif