This volume addresses a variety of areas in which computers are used to manage and manipulate nucleic acid and protein sequence data. The manipulations include searching, aligning, and determining the significance of similarities, as well as the construction of phylogenetic trees that show the evolutionary history of related sequences. Ready-to-use methods for the "at-the-bench" scientist are presented.

In these days of facile cloning and rapid DNA sequencing, it is not uncommon for investigators to find themselves with a DNA sequence that may or may not code for a known gene product. The sequence is 'open' when read in an appropriate frame, which is to say that there is a long run of amino acid codons before the appearance of a terminator codon. How can we find out if this 'unidentified reading frame' (URF) really codes for a genuine protein, and how can we identify it if it exists?

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece Macbeth II iii 72 Whence and what are those execrable shape? Paradise Lost Ib 1 681 Confusion worse confounded Paradise Lost Ib 1 995 When the manuscript for the first part of this book was proposed, it was anticipated that the discussion of the entire field of protein se quencing could be covered in a single volume - from purification and characterization of the protein through fragmentation by chemical or enzymic means and, finally, to reassembly of the identified individual peptides into the reconstructed total sequence. It soon became evident that...

This book charts the step-by-step evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation in the context of molecular evolution with a focus on the search for blood clotting genes in the genomes of non-mammalian vertebrates. An extensive glossary and guide to the current literature combine to make this book ideal for course use as well as for self-study.