APES- Bushmeat DNA Blast Assignment
Name: _ Mayra Pelcastre R _________________
Backstory: Imagine you are working with conservationists in Cameroon. You want to help them identify potential poachers and help them to enforce local poaching laws. You need to identify which vendors are selling the poached meat but it is in pieces and hard to identify the species by sight- what do you do?
Instructions:
1: Using the DNA Blast Program - http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi type in the DNA sequence into the nucleotide blast. Choose the “Nucleotide blast”.
Under Database, make sure to choose “other”.
2: Using the results from the blast, type the organism name into google to find out what organism you have. (Common Name)
Sample #A62498: __ Sitatunga, Marshbuck ___________
Sample #B77342: __ Plasmodium Autheruri __________
Sample #C79942: __
__________________
Sample #C80217: __ African Elephant _______________
Sample #C90034: __ Drill, Subgenus of Papio _________
Sample #D51210: __ Gorilla ________________________
Sample #G34176: __
Preuss’s Monkey
_______________
Sample #G54358: __ Greater Cane Rat _______________
Sample #H64991: __ West African Red Colobus _______
Sample #I38722: ___ Peters Duiker __________________
Sample #K28831: __ Jentink’s Duiker ________________
Sample #N51683:___ Bongo _______________________
Conclusion: Why is it important to know the genome of an organism? How does it help us to identify endangered and threatened species?
It’s important to now the genome of an organism because it would be a secure answer to identify the type of organism it is. People can not lie when they are asked what kind of animal they are selling and hunting for profit illegally when a sample of the genome is tested. Knowing the genome of an organism helps us identify endangered and threatened species. By knowing its exact DNA we can identify if people are hunting and selling the endangered species we would definitely now the exact breed of the animal.
We can then stop those people who are poaching the endangered animals and help the increase the population.