Looking at my sequence of animals, there are a few conclusions I can come to. One conclusion I can come to is that my protein, lipoxygenase, must be very common because a variety of animals are in the sequence you may not think of as “relatives”. Sense lipoxygenase is involved in the metabolism that shows that all the organisms in my sequence have metabolisms or some form of one, making this gene very common.
When initially searching this gene, many variations of humans and chimps came up. When I researched the protein it came up that it is mostly in plants. This surprised me because in the search for making the sequence, the front page was animals. There also wasn’t a huge variety in the animals until I dug a little deeper and found more animals on later pages.
I can not speak to question 3 because T-coffee has not generated an alignment for me. Its been processing for about 45 minutes and there seems to be no progress. I can, however, imagine that there will be a stand out in the alignment and I think it will be the zebrafish. On the tree it showed that arctic salmon and golden hamster are more closely related than arctic salmon and zebrafish. I’m not an expert on evolution but I feel like fish should be on the same branch and not closer to a hamster than another fish. That one stood out to me.
If I could add data to my tree I would add more species that I believe are closely related and see where they fall in the sequence. I would also compare organisms that I believed to be closely related that didn’t show up in the search of having this gene and see how their genes compare. Why do some organisms have it and others don’t? I am very surprised that some related organisms didn’t show up in the initial search. I am curious as to why. Is this gene not very important in relating organisms to one another?
AP bio 