Did you know that scientists have developed the technology to edit the DNA of animals, including humans? In fact, this technique has already been used to cure some diseases that result from mutations in DNA!
In this activity, you will “cure” two different diseases by generating a simulation of the real life techniques for editing DNA. For each disease, you will be given two DNA sequences—one from a healthy person, and one from a person with a disease. Follow these links for each disease to access the DNA sequences: Sickle-cell anemia and Huntington’s Disease.
For each disease, you have three tasks:
1. Find the difference between the sequences.
→ Paste the two sequences into this alignment tool and identify where they differ: Needleman-Wunsch Server.
2. Edit the bad sequence to fix it.
→ Create a python notebook to replace the mutated DNA back to the correct DNA.
→ To check that you’ve done it right, align your resulting DNA with the original healthy DNA sequence (using Clustal Omega) and make sure they match perfectly.
3. Fill in the table below.
→ To identify amino acid changes, convert both the disease and healthy DNA sequences into proteins using a python notebook that you create. You can use this example python code: convertDNAtoProtein.py. The same code is also available on the Jupyter hub in the hub_share_data folder:
Next, compare the amino acid sequences with an alignment here: Protein Alignment Server
→ For insertions or deletions, write what amino acid(s) were inserted or deleted. For point mutations, show what the correct amino acid should be, and what it was changed to in the disease-associated protein.