Life before BLAST etc? Help needed... - (Jan/27/2013 )

Hi there,

My first post - yippee! At the risk of sounding like a novice (well, I am) I have the following question:

How do you know that a gene sequence you have obtained is correct? Obviously there is the searching against the databases (which I have done and I do have a match) but what how else could this be undertaken? Or what did scientists used to do before these were available? What experiments could be done to check for accuracy of the sequence?

Thanks for your time and I look forward to your help!

TPO

Welcome to BioForum!

Before there is sequence databases like GenBank, if you have cloned a sequence, the first thing you can do is to get it published in Science or Nature.

Because there is no reference sequence to compare with, you can verify the sequence by a number of means, for example, restriction enzyme digest, Southern or Northern blotting using a probe based on the sequence.