At the moment, sequencing information is being added at the rate of about 6-million base pairs per day. By now, you must surely be impressed. In the case of the NCBI database, the data is sitting there, but it is useful because of its accessibility via the World Wide Web. So I m going to pause for a moment and summarise what I ve been talking about. To answer this question, I must make sure everyone is up to speed with some basic ideas in molecular biology.
Proteins are actually the things which carry out biological function.
For all the hoo-ha about genes and DNA, these things are only the instructions, proteins are the things that are the performers in a cell and one of the most important groups of proteins are the enzymes which are responsible for carrying out the chemical reactions in cells. That s really all the molecular biology you need to know for the purposes of this talk. So let me just summarise what I ve been saying. Gene sequences allow you to work out protein sequences which allow you, albeit incompletely at this point in time, to work out protein function and the general molecular workings of organisms. Let me give you one example of how powerful this ability to work out protein function from gene sequence is.