need some help for exam question? - (Sep/19/2007 )

Hi alls

" Currently, all the genomic sequences of rice are avaiable. You can make access to the sequence information via internet. In rice, microarray chip techniques can be utilized to examine the expression of all the rice genes. You can easily transform rice plant with any genes of your interest. In this test, let's assume that you can obtain knock-out mutants of all the rice genes.
Your advisor has been working on a rice mutant call "dwarf 1" this mutant exhibits a phenotype of short height.
Your advisor gave you a 20 kb DNA fragment and its sequencing information. He asked you ti find how many genes are present in the 20kb DNA fragment and to find whether one of these genes is reponsible for the "dwarf 1" phenotype. Please design experiment and answer the questions that your advisor asked to you"

Above is original my exam question, cause I don't have much experient in this subject, so anybody can help me answer that question, I hope I can get the question from you, thank you in advance

Hi Subletah,
Why don't you suggest a strategy for this and then let others comment on your answer? The start of the question gives you a lot of information. Have a think about what it is telling you and try to come up with an answer. I don't think you need exact experience just use the question and think generally.

Best wishes,
Ceri

as for the first question:

how many genes are there in this 20kb fragment?

you could answer this one without entering the lab at all. since you have the sequence of the fragment and you can download any genomic sequence.
can you think of a sequence that is part of every gene´s code? could you find that one in the internet and let a program search how often it appears in the sequence of your fragment?

i dont know if bioinformatics is part of your education. so it could be that this is not a valid approach for your problem.