This year we will be holding our annual science conference in San Diego California. We will be using our conference to highlight the importance of genetics and health testing to help you make more informed decisions. The location of this event is still not determined. 

There will also be space available for vendors. We are always pleased to see our vendors including some of best SEO companies in the U.S. like JetRank.

We are considering one of the San Diego venues on this list. Please let us know your thoughts about which venue is best. We will have a venue …

Paralogs can be used if we cannot identify an orthologous relationship between two proteins. We would look at each protein’s gene family and do a separate phylogenetic analysis for every gene family.

What does a cladogram represent?

A cladogram is a phylogenetic tree used to determine if one group of things evolved from another group. This allows us to compare multiple different species and determine their evolutionary relationships. Cladograms also show the relationship between different features, which can help analyse how those features have changed over time.

What is the challenge of determining evolutionary relationships?

The biggest challenge of determining …

We can use gene duplication and loss to determine if our proteins are related or not. If there are two genes in a cluster but one of them is missing, it means that they recently diverged from each other. If both genes are still present, then they have been evolving together for a longer period of time.

What is the purpose of gene duplication?

The primary function of gene duplication is to create more copies for mutation. If one copy mutates and becomes non-functional, there will be another copy that can take over its function.

What is the purpose of …

This information can be used by an algorithm called BLAST, which finds all proteins that are similar to each other and groups them together into “clusters”.

From here, we can assume that the sequences in each cluster evolved together. Once this is done, we can compare clusters to find out which one contains the most functional genes.

How are homologous features used in phylogenetic tree construction?

We want our protein sequence to be grouped with its “most closely related proteins”. This means that we want to find the cluster of proteins that is our “closest evolutionary relative”. To do this, …

There are two main types of errors that can occur in this process: false positive and false negative. A false positive occurs when two proteins are incorrectly found to be homologous, while a false negative occurs when one protein is not found to be homologous with another.

What is an example of a false positive?

For example, the BLAST search between “Homo sapiens” and “Bos taurus” returns multiple results, including human growth hormone, which is not homologous to Bos taurus.

What is an example of a false negative?

For example, when BLAST search between “Homo sapiens” and “Bos taurus”, the …

A set of protein fragments (e.g., sequence motifs) present in multiple proteins. Each of these protein fragments is called an “aligned feature”, and the process by which they are discovered is called “feature discovery”.

The problem of finding all aligned features in two sets of proteins is referred to as “alignment” or “feature alignment”.

What is an example of a feature?

For example, collagen contains the aligned features: GPGXXGXXX (where X represents any amino acid) and HXXXXXH (where X represents any amino acid). Here we can see that both GPGXXGXXX and HXXXXXH are part of the same aligned features.

What …