Predicted Onco-Motif (Disease Motifs)

This paper is also included in the book "Disease Motifs - A wild speculative excursion into the field of bioinformatics", which will explain more about the basics of some of the work involved here, in case you are interested in doing your own research or just want to gain a better understanding of this type of stuff.


Abstract
Introduction
Using short sequence similarity searches to find motifs that might have some associated with a pathology e.g. an onco-motif.
Method
A protein sequence is split-up into small sequences of 10 amino acids long and these are compared against the Swiss-Prot protein database using BLAST. A multiple sequence alignment is used to find areas of similarity on some of the sequences.
Results
Two maxima were found at sequences 169 and 178. Sequence 178 (VWSFGILLWE) returned 250 proteins of many different species but there were only eight viral proteins present, all from viruses that have been known to cause cancer albeit in non-human hosts e.g. mice, chickens. Forty human proteins were returned; the majority having some association with cancer.
Conclusion
A 12-amino-acid sequence (SDVWSFGILLWE) may form part of an onco-motif.

This is included in a larger work found in the book "Disease Motifs - A Wild Speculative Excursion into the Field of Bioinformatics"

Please be aware that this work has a lot of colour images, so you might well think to download it on to your computer, if your Kindle or other device does not show coloured images properly.