DNA to Trait 2. Identifying the gene behind Metallic ( M).

Students will first encounter Metallic ( M) as an inherited phenotypic variation in scale color. It is present in the current screens.

More detailed reports on the phenotype of Metallic and other scale-color variants can be fed to students as studies done by others. In the case of Metallic, microscopic examination of scales from adult drakes will reveal that Metallic scales have no pigment granules in the surface layer, while nonmetallic scales have pigment granules in both the surface and basal layers.

We can think of Charcoal (Nightwing) as a melanistic variant of Steel. It would be fairly straightforward of the author of the study fed to students to suggest that nonmetallic is a melanistic variant, and that in populations of mammals, these typically result from variation in the melanocortin receptor gene ( Mc1r) or in the agouti signalling protein gene ( Asip in drakes).

Imagine that the drake genome sequence becomes available well after the publication of the phenotypic analysis of Metallic.

Students would sequence the melanocortin receptor gene ( Mc1r) and the agouti gene ( Asip) from Metallic drakes and compare the sequences to Nightwing.

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 Steel drake from their stable and send a DNA sample to a facility for sequencing. They ask that the Asip and Mc1r genes 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 links.

The links go to pages that display the sequence of the predicted transcript of the Asip and Mc1r genes 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 pages look like? Click the links below.

Asip sequence from Steel Drake

Mc1r sequence from Steel Drake

The reader is reminded that the strain used for the reference assembly is Nightwing (Charcoal).