Introduction

The goals of this excercise are

1) to familiarize you with the use of the software package DNASTAR for desktop-based nucleic acid sequence analysis
2) to use the sequence editing and analysis module orf DNASTAR to annotate your sequence, remove vector sequence, translate your sequence and search genetic databases for entries simialr to your sequence, and
3) to introduce you to the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST)

Procedures
 

A) Importing your DNA sequence into DNASTAR format.
 

1) Put the disk with your *.rpt file into the floppy drive (A:) of the computer
2) Rename the file *.rpt to *.txt
3) Open the EditSeq module of DNASTAR

Start
    Programs
          DNASTAR
                EditSeq

4) Import the *.txt file

Import
     Look In: 3.5 Floppy (A:)
          Files of Type: Text files (*.txt)
                Select your file by double-clicking on it

Your file should appear on a split screen, with DNA sequence above and blank page below

B) Annotate your sequence by typing in the following information in the lower screen

Your name(s)
Date of sequence run
Sequence image file/path
What part of the sequence is vector and what part is insert (1-x = vector, y-z = insert)

D) Use the first 100 nucleotides of your insert sequence to perform a BLAST query (Use instructions in documentation handout for EditSeq)