Future Ben

What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I have spent a large chunk of my day trying to figure out another of these little puzzles and it has left me rather cross. In fact I have spent at least a dozen hours over the past few days trying to pick apart other people’s cryptic little maps. This is the promoter/enhancer of Flk1, some receptor that does I don’t know what. The point is that this sequence will cause expression in developing vascualture. The key word here is SEQUENCE. Why am I looking at a crude line drawing when they could just post a text file? No, instead I have to Genbank and BLAST my way through the mouse genome looking for the right piece of DNA then take my best guess at what they cut out. Did they not know the sequence? I guess this stuff came out in 1995 so it wouldn’t be surprizing.

I remember an a review paper about Genomics being, “too much information” to be useful. Give us our bright and shining gel bands of approximate size! Luddites! I dig through notebooks of paper notes, pictures, crude maps all for one text file worth of information. And the actual DNA is nowhere to be found. Its a wonder anything ever got done that way.

So here I am, doing reverse bioinformatics to digitize what has already been published. Compiling my sequences in VectorNTI and creating dynamic maps that have more information that I am going to use, which is just about enough.