Bioinformatics is a broad field that interfaces a variety of life science disciplines with a variety of quantitative sciences. Questions on Bioinformatics are expected to have a direct biological component to them or they may belong on Stackoverflow or Superuser.
12
votes
1answer
2k views
What is the significance and method behind Ramachandran plots?
My PI showed a Ramachandran plot in class today with minimal explanation, but I'm interested in finding out more. I understand that the Ramachandran plot shows the relation between the omega phi and ...
9
votes
3answers
251 views
Source of DNA sequences
I'm working on a project where I am taking DNA sequences and translating the codons into musical notes. I have some good ideas of how to do this, I'm just not sure what sequences to work with. My case ...
6
votes
3answers
187 views
What's the use of DNA sequencing results?
Suppose I sequence DNA of some organism (a human perhaphs) and now I have the entire DNA "string" - the sequence of nucleotides.
What's the use of that? It's just a "string" where nucleotides encode ...
20
votes
4answers
758 views
What exactly are computers used for in DNA sequencing?
I've thoroughly read the Wikipedia article on DNA sequencing and can't get one thing.
There's some hardcore chemistry involved in the process that somehow splits the DNA and then isolates its parts.
...
5
votes
2answers
133 views
First pass protein structure prediction
I'm working with a protein that doesn't have any homology to other proteins so it will likely require ab initio structure prediction. However, since I don't work for a structure prediction lab and I ...
4
votes
3answers
94 views
How to create a collection of anonymous sequences for teaching and testing? [closed]
I am looking for a large collection (>1000) of sequence files (eg. FASTA) from any real organism or a tool to create such a collection.
The sequence files would be used for teaching and for testing ...
9
votes
2answers
191 views
How can I pare down a PDB file in Python to only include specific residues?
I'm trying to make a script that will take a MTZ file (reflections), convert it into a CCP4 map, then pare that map down to only encompass a desired area to cut down on the size of my PyMol session ...
6
votes
1answer
72 views
Is there a tool to find the action of an enzyme in a metabolic pathway?
Is there any tool to search the biochemical action of a particular enzyme in a metabolic pathway of an organism? In other words, how can I find if enzyme "E" is involved in the metabolic pathway for ...
10
votes
3answers
382 views
Why do restriction enzymes tend to have an even number of bases in their recognition site?
When reading my textbook I noticed that in all examples but one from eight the recognition site was an even number of bases.
I wondered if this was just a co-incidence, so I took the data from this ...
3
votes
1answer
240 views
Displaying nucleotide at a single position from RNA-seq reads in a BAM file
How do I display a single nucleotide position from reads in a BAM file? I have been looking at variation using samtools mpileup, but I want to actually just display the nucleotide at the position I am ...
5
votes
1answer
118 views
Is it possible to add a new sequence to a blast database without recreating it from scratch?
I have a new sequence and I want to add it to a pre-constructed BLAST database containing other sequences. The makeblastdb help does not give any hint on this regard.
7
votes
1answer
89 views
PDB Mining: Why Do I Find Atoms Less than 1 Angstrom Apart?
I am attempting to find potential Hydrogen bonds between Hydrogen donors and aromatic ring acceptors. I do this by predicting the location of Hydrogens on residues and then calculating how far these ...
10
votes
1answer
192 views
How do I get the current “camera position” in PyMol so I can reuse it in scripts?
I have a few protein models I want to take pictures of with various ligands bound. It would be nice if I could do it from the same "position", but the only way I can figure out to repeat the same ...
8
votes
2answers
753 views
How can rooted and unrooted (phylogenetic) trees be distinguished from one another
I understand that both are similar in structure
But how can they be easily identified as one or the other?
Is it simply based on the presence or lack of a named root (the root is identified as a ...
