Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

the project that I'm doing ( you can see the website address of my information bar) tells me that you can get the information on the vaccine and the virus. When you do the BLAST comparison, the matches between the raw DNA of the virus and the vaccine shows how many matches there are between the two and the more similar they arethe better the vaccine is because your immune system will be ready for that. So... where are the vaccine codes?

Thanks in advance,
Martonp

Hi Martonp,

Let me see if i understand -
have you already found the DNA sequence for the virus?
and run the blast and got some outputs?
when you say vaccine code, do you mean DNA sequence?

-Caroline

Thanks for replying!
Yes thats it. I have found the DNA sequence for the virus, inserted it into BLAST. The question I have is "are the things that come up after pressing GO in BLAST the DNA sequences for the vaccines?"
Sorry about the misinterpretation with the "vaccine code".
Thanks in advance
Martonp

Hi Martonp,

The results of the BLAST will show any sequences in the database you tested against that have similarity or "match" with your sequence. If you ran it against all of the DNA sequences at NCBI this will include vaccines as well as other viruses, and any other DNA that is similar.

Usually the way the results page looks at NCBI is that it has a bunch of coloured lines at the top that show which part of your sequence matched to something.

Then if you scroll down it starts to list specific id numbers and the percentage identity.

Then if you scroll down further it shows the alignment between your DNA sequence and the DNA sequence it matched to. These are what you should focus on. There should be a description of the name of the DNA sequence it matched to and an ID number that you can click on.

Let me know if this looks like what you got. What do you find if you click on the identifiers for the sequences in the BLAST results?

-Caroline