From Dayhoff to the airport

I'm off to a science teaching meeting at Furman in Greenville, SC. Richmond International Airport has FREE wireless internet. I'm not sure that people would come to the airport just to use the wireless connection, but it's a nice perk, and it allowed me to post.

Today in class we talked about the theory of scoring matrices in pairwise sequence alignment of protein sequences. I hope we can wrap our head around the idea that pairwise alignment scores help us determine whether two proteins are similar by homology or random chance. Below the twilight zone of 20% identity, telling these possibilities apart becomes more difficult.

Now that we know how a scoring matrix such as PAM250 or BLOSUM62 works, we can talk about the computer programs that apply these scoring matrices.

Have a good weekend!