who said science can't be fun?

BLAST is a bioinformatics tool we use in biology to find regions of similarity between sequences. One function of this tool is that you can enter an unknown sequence, and it returns the best match sequence from its database of organisms. Now we can do it in terms of the nucleotides (the A, C, G, Ts) or we can do it in terms of proteins. Proteins are basically many amino acids strung together, where 20 amino acids are represented 20 letters of the alphabet.

So what happens when you BLAST regular words or names?
A sort of message deeply ingrained in the essence of life perhaps??

Here’s a snippet of the quirky results that someone from Seed Magazine found:

… The query for "BUSH" receives no hits, primarily because it is deemed a "low complexity sequence." This is compounded by the fact that the letters B and U do not exist as specific amino acids

… Finally, in an effort to further demonstrate my impartiality, I begrudgingly entered "PRESIDENTBUSH." In this case, the best non-hypothetical match—one that can actually be assigned a biological function—was from the genome of Entamoeba histolytica. The organism is a single-celled, parasitic protozoan known for infections that sometimes last for years, which may be accompanied by vague gastrointestinal distress or dysentery—complete with blood and mucus in the stool.

A single-celled parasite that infects you for years and might give you bloody diarrhoea. Got that?

Read the full story: Concerning the President of the United States. It’s an amusing read!

So after all the laughing, I decided to be a geek and blasted my own name, to see what DNA has to say about it. I'm such a geek.

The string 'CHARLENETAN' returned 'fumarate reductase, iron-sulfur protein' of the Hildenborough strain of the bacterium Desulfovibrio vulgaris. So yay! I’m a bacterial enzyme!
Not that my name actually appears as part of the bacterial sequence though. I don’t think it's likely that there's an exact match.

For those of you are geeky enough to follow in my geeky footsteps, here’s the link to BLAST.
Simply enter your name and hit the BLAST! button.
On the resulting page that indicates your request ID, click on the Format! button.
Wait a bit for the page to load and then scroll down till you see the heading ‘Sequences producing significant alignments’
Click the top hit and congratulate yourself on your geekiness.

Do post a comment about what you are and if you got an exact match!

Oh yah, in case you didn’t notice… I’m such a geek. :p