Hmmm good point, but I’m just curious if it’s a normal base pair mutation or a microindel if gel electrophoresis would allow you to detect such a minute change? I feel like just a single base pair mutation would be difficult to detect through a gel since the weight and length would be almost identical to the unmutated molecule. It definitely could be worth a shot and would definitely be a cheaper option than sequencing.Originally Posted by asplundii
You would not necessarily have to get it sequenced. And indel in the gen would generate a product of a different length than the WT and this would resolve as a band with altered mobility on a gel. This is basically what they did for locating the mutation in Albino corn snakes:
And even if you did have to get the amplicon sequenced, no, sequencing does not cost a lot. Amplicon sequencing might cost you a couple hundred bucks. And then all you would have to do is run a BLAST alignment
Also yes sadly a few hundred dollars for me is still kind of expensive. But I also imagine we’d want several spiders sequenced and several normals sequenced in order to reduce normal background noise and error which would bring the project total well into the thousands. I can’t seem to find any ball python samples on genbank that would directly help our project so we’d probably be starting from scratch at least trying to explore the bmp morphogens. I believe nucleotide diversity among synonymous sites in reptiles averages around 1% whereas in humans it’s around 0.1% or so, so we’d definitely want to check our bases (pun) as we go to avoid the larger error chance in reptiles.
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