c/c

DNA to Trait 1. Identifying the gene behind colorless (c or Tyr).

Students will first encounter colorless ( c) as an inherited phenotypic variation in scale color. It is a great project in heredity, because it is an easy-to-understand example of epistasis.

Albinism is a striking trait. A detailed report on the phenotype can be fed to students. The enzyme assay for tyrosinase is relatively straightforward; the report fed to students might confirm that Frost drakes have no detectable tyrosinase activity.

Students would simply sequence the Tyrosinase ( Tyr) gene from mutant drakes and compare the sequence to that of Nightwing. This is so easy that it might well be the students' first use of the database and sequence comparison tools. A check of the OMIM entry on Tyr shows that some mutations responsible for albinism are frameshift mutations; these would be very easy for students to identify, so it would make sense to use a frameshift allele in colorless drakes.

From this outline, you can see that this requires us to: 1) devise ways to feed research information to students (easy), 2) build a genomic database that supports simple queries, and 3) devise (or steal) a tool that allows the comparison of DNA and amino acid sequences.

Let us imagine that we have got students to the point that they are ready to take a Frost drake from their stable and send a DNA sample to a facility for sequencing. They ask that only the Tyr gene be sequenced. The computational biology and genomics in Geniverse are better than what we have in our world. The facilty returns the results to the student in the form of a link.

The link goes to a page that displays the sequence of the predicted transcript of the Tyr gene from the mutant drake. This is hard to interpret by itself, but such is the power of steampunk genomics that the sequence from the mutant drake is aligned to the standard sequence from Nightwing. In addition, a predicted protein sequence is generated and aligned to the standard sequence from Nightwing.

What would such a page look like? Click the link below.

Tyr sequence from Frost Drake