Help about computers applied to Biology

[Bernard Murray]

In article <64315.jibave at uachih.uachnet.mx>, jibave at UACHIH.UACHNET.MX says...
>
>Hello, I'm working on developing an algorithim to determine the DNA 
>sequence of a natural polypeptide based on a polypeptide which has suffered
>a mutation. I'm analyzing this kind of situations and can't figure out an
>efficient method to determine which was the mutation. (insertion, deletion
>or a change of nucleotides).

How about reverse translating the peptide and then looking for reading
frames in the resulting DNA (most ORF programs will cope with ambiguous
bases).  Hopefully codon usage will also give you an indication as to
possible frameshifts - if not, and you have a rough idea as to what
the peptide and/or DNA should look like, it may be possible to do this
by straightforward sequence alignment.
		Bernard

Bernard Murray, Ph.D.
bernard at elsie.nci.nih.gov  (National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda MD, USA)