Hello friends,

I got a question for you. I'm working on a tomato mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) gene to check its functions against different pathogens and diseases. This gene has never been reported before. Today I was looking for its related sequences and saw an unpublished sequence in tomato with 100% nucleotide similarity in BLAST. This sequence was submitted in 2007 and some details were given like A tomato gene against some pathogens and diseases.

From that it seems that somebody else is also working on the same gene with same objectives. But I've started to work on it from the last six months and the work is in initial stages. What should I do? Shall I also submit the sequence? Please guide me about the consequences. What could happen if someone else published before me?

I need some opinions as I'm relatively new in this field.
Regards

First: don't panic.
The sequence has been submitted, but as long as I understand you don't know exactly about the research made by the other group. It's not necessary the same of yours.
I can suggest you to take a look to the reference reported among the accession details. That will give you very important information: what kind of reference it is (paper, sequence direct submission...), which group published it, what is the reason why they are on that sequence? and so on...

It happened to me to find that a concurrent group published first.
In that case I had to put that work aside, but it depends from case to case. Sometimes it's possible to submit the work anyway, even if there's a similar one already in recent literature. If you find that another group submitted a paper on your topic, try to study a way to make your manuscript different. You can even decide to study the results of the other group and optimise yours...

Good luck!
ILA