Hi Espike,
This is a really fascinating project (
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p001.shtml), which looks at how protein structures relate to the relationships among different organisms.
Hemoglobin is a very interesting molecule, considering that it is our oxygen carrying protein. The subunits are very important. In fact, different subunits are what give fetal hemoglobin a higher affinity for oxygen than adult hemoglobin. Read here for more information about subunits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin I also suggest that you do a bit of research on your own.
If the globin subunits are different enough, they may have different designations for different animals. The human hemoglobin subunits are usually alpha, beta, and gamma, but there are other subunits like epsilon in different animals. Again, you may have to do a bit more research to get further information on this.
To find the protein sequences on Genbank, go to the main page (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/), then use the drop-down menu to select
Protein. Type the name of the protein and the species name (e.g., hemoglobin
Homo sapiens) in the search bar, then press enter. You will scroll through the results and pick one that you want to view. When you compare different animals, the best thing is to compare the same subunit of hemoglobin. I believe the alpha subunit is fairly common among different animals, so that might be a good one to use.
Once you click on the search result you want to view, click
FASTA to view the amino acid sequence. This is the sequence you would copy and paste into BLAST.
I hope that helps you get going. Please post again (in this same thread) if you have more questions.
Heather