Discovering the Genome
If you are having trouble finding the RNA sequence data, here is a link with this data track turned on: http://tinyurl.com/p9dyyqu.
Go to the "Browser" section and view the data.
- The RNAseq data is displayed graphically in a coverage plot. The more sequence reads you have in a region, the higher the plot is. More RNA sequence reads means more gene expression.
- Notice the scale is a log base 2 scale. Remember that log2(x) means the power you have to raise 2 to get x (i.e. 22 = 4, so log2(4) is 2).
- Notice that higher RNAseq coverage corresponds with exon locations. This makes sense because exons are transcribed and introns are not.
- Also, in this experiment there are four time points. One is called “Tachyzoite” which is the stage of Toxoplasma that infects humans. The other three time points (day3, day5, and day7) are from Toxoplasma stages in the cat.
- For each stage or time point, you will see blue RNAseq data that indicates gene expression for the blue gene (TGME49_312960) and red RNAseq data indicating gene expression of the red gene (TGME49_312970).