Saturday, April 26, 2008 - 06:21
Over 2600 genetic diseases have been found where a change in a single gene is linked to the disease. One of the questions we might ask is how those mutations change the shape and possibly the function of a protein?
If the structures of the mutant and wild type (normal) proteins have been solved, NCBI has a program called VAST that can be used to align those structures. I have an example here where you can see how a single amino acid change makes influenza resistant to Tamiflu®.
This 4 minute movie below shows how we can obtain those aligned structures from VAST and view them with Cn3D.
CN3D and VAST from Sandra Porter on Vimeo.
CN3D and VAST from Sandra Porter on Vimeo.