When you work with DNA or protein sequences, inevitably, you’re going to run into the challenge of finding similar biological sequences that have been listed in patents. In most cases, you’re likely to know specific mutations at specific positions that you want to search for. The challenge is, how do you define a query that delivers a manageable set of results?
If you’ve already experienced this challenge, you’re not alone. This is something sequence searchers have been struggling with for years, and it occurs quite often. For instance, you may want to search an antibody sequence to assess variations in specific chains or screen for specific variations in short probe sequences. As new technologies like Crispr/Cas9 continue to evolve, the need for such analysis will only increase in importance.
Everyone has developed a few of their own tips and tricks, but in most cases, it is still a very time consuming process. A great example would be finding biological sequences similar to your favorite protein that carry one or more specific variations that you are working on, but you also know that other mutations that you don’t really care about might exist.
If time is not a constraint, you will probably just run an NCBI Blast search and spend the next few hours reviewing the alignment results, one by one.
What if we told you we have a process that can get you the same results, but instead of hours and hours of manual comparisons, they’re delivered within minutes.
We’ve even created a video to show how to find single point mutations in biological sequences using the CRISPR/Cas9 protein sequence as an example. In just a few minutes we retrieve the patents that describe Cas9 isoforms carrying one or more of a list of six mutations of interest … instead of reviewing 24,000 Blast alignments!
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