Bioinformatics 1 Flashcards
What are two types of pairwise alignments?
Global alignment and local alignment
What is a global alignment?
Finds the simplest alignment across the entire two sequences - key for building a MSA
What are global alignments used for?
Similar proteins - same protein from different species.
What is a local alignment?
Tries to identify any common domains/regions between sequences and aligns them - these will be surrounded by unaligned regions.
What happens if you use a local alignment on very similar proteins?
It will affectively just do a global alignment.
What are local alignments used for?
Protein sequences with common domains and aligning cDNA to the genomic sequence.
Why do you need to use a local alignment for aligning cDNA to the genome and not a global alignment?
A global alignment will try to force an alignment because the exons match - but would be wrong.
A local alignment would give several alignments for each exon match in the genome - this identifies their location in the genome.
What database does blastn use?
nucleotide
What database does blastp use?
amino acid
What is the query type and database for tblastn?
query = amino acid database = translated nucleotide
What is the query type and database for blastx?
query = translated nucleotide database = amino acid
What is the query type and database for tblastx?
query = translated nucleotide database = translated nucleotdie
Which one of all the BLAST programs does not search in a protein database?
blastn
Why can a non exact match be as informative as a perfect match in an alignment?
Because amino acids are mutated during evolution - there is a higher probability the mutated amino acid being maintained if the chemical/physical properties of original amino acid are being maintained in the mutation. This means that mutations between sequences can be scored.
How do you build a substitution matrix?
By choosing a group of similar proteins and scoring based on the observed frequency of the amino acids within the protein.
What was the first substitution matrix and when was it developed?
PAM - point accepted mutation developed in the 1970s.
Note = by Margaret Dayhoff
How was PAM developed?
Did a global alignment on closely related proteins and looked at the sequence differences in the proteins - used this to derive a scoring matrix for how often at position did one amino acid mutate to another.