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Using HIV to prove some points about evolution, part III

By sporte on August 21, 2006.

In which we see the results and come to our own conclusions.

If you want to let other people tell you what's right and what's wrong, they will surely do so. Turn on the TV and hordes of happy actors bounce around, only too happy to help you purchase the right deodorant. Open your e-mail and everyone wants to share the best on-line pharmacy and investment guide.

Ugh.

I prefer making my own decisions, thank you very much.

So, I want to give you a chance to look at the data and decide for yourself, if the data show HIV protease sequences changing over time.

Let's see the results.

We're experimenting with HIV in this series. If you want to see where we've been and get an idea where we're going, here are the links.

Part I. Meet HIV and learn how we're going to use it look at evolution. An introduction to the experiment and a link to a short flash movie on HIV.
Part II. Instructions for doing the experiment.
Part III. Look at the sequence results.
Part IV. Look at protein structures and see if we can explain why the experiment worked the way it did.

You can do the experiment on your own, as I described in part II, or you can go ahead and look at the data here.

Before you look at the data, though, let's review our questions:

1. Do you see genetic diversity? That is - are the sequences all identical or are they different from each other?

2. The first sequence is a sequence from a drug-sensitive strain of the virus. (This is the sequence on the top from left to right.) Are there any amino acid changes that are shared by all of the drug-resistant strains?

This is your chance to look at the data without any of my biases. Click the image to see a larger picture.

i-d791718035af5d902aaf947ff4b93a47-small_results.gif

Ta ta for now!

Update: The X that you see in some of the sequences represents an unidentified amino acid.

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bioinformatics
classroom activities
evolution
Genetics & Molecular Biology
HIV/AIDS
Population Genetics
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