Listen to the podcast at https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/sequencing-smoothies
Data from smoothie sequencing experiment:
smoothie.fastq - data from smoothie sequencing experiment at The Perse School, Cambridge on 14/11/16. The flow cell was R9 and the sequencing kit was the Rapid Sequencing kit SQK-RAD001
fruit_salad_canteen.fastq - data for the challenge.
Challenge! I sequenced some DNA extracted from fruit salad I bought from our canteen. Can you determine what species it belongs to?
Open the file fruit_salad_canteen.fastq and highlight just some DNA sequence (text made of ACGT, no other letters or numbers) and paste it into:
http://plantgdb.org/cgi-bin/blast/PlantGDBblast
under step 2. Go to the very start of the text box, write a title of >yournames-test and press enter once, so it looks a bit like this:
>Kims-test
ATATAGATAG.....
Your DNA sequence should be right under the title with no gap.
Go back to step 1. and click the box marked all species. Then, under organism, click the box marked select all.
Go down to step 3 and click Run Blast.
There are a lot of different results. Are any of them linked to a fruit?
At the moment, it is harder to find out what plant DNA is present in a sample than what bacterial DNA is present. There are a couple of reasons for this. What do you think these are?
I'm on twitter @kim_judge_