Bioinformatics: Our Sequences Are Ready!

✨ Great news — we have finally received our DNA sequences!
The samples were sequenced at MacroGen in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and now we are entering a new stage of our work — bioinformatic analysis of the sequencing data.

🔍 The first step is to assess the quality of the sequences. For this, we check the chromatogram: whether the signal is clean, if there are any errors, or if everything looks good.
📑 If we have a single short DNA fragment, it can already be used. But if sequencing was done with multiple primers and the fragments overlap, we assemble them into a single contig. Special software and algorithms help put together many fragments into one complete molecular story.

🔡 And the “alphabet” of DNA is very simple — only four letters: A, C, T, G. Much easier than the human alphabet, isn’t it?

🌐 Next comes the “Google for biologists” — the BLAST system. It compares our sequences with a huge international database and finds the closest “relatives” of our organisms. This is still a preliminary analysis, but it already allows us to identify our organism with molecular data and find similar ones that have been studied before.

🚀 Many more steps, discoveries, and new data are ahead. Stay tuned!

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