Jonathan Eisen, professor at UC Davis and Academic Editor in Chief of PLoS, wrote an interesting entry in his blog: “Tracing the evolutionary history of Sarah Palin: links to a parasitic nematode and the pathogenic fungus Botryotinia fuckeliana“.

It is always fun to see unique application of sequence databases and tools. Dr. Eisen also mentioned looking for ELVIS in the protein sequence databases - an example I came across in some of my lectures when I was in grad school. Here’s another fun example, highlighted in NCBI educational materials.

It is interesting to see what one can do with these tools and databases! Does anyone have any other examples they’d like to share? Please let me know and I’ll be sure to share them on the blog.