Answer to the Monday Night Mystery

Plega sp. (Mantispidae)

Who was the source of Monday’s DNA? As many of you discerned from the online Genbank database, the sequence came from Plega dactylota, a Neuropteran insect in the family Mantispidae.

10 points to Aaron Hardin, who guessed it first.

For future reference, these genetic puzzles are only slightly more complicated than a Google search. Go to NCBI’s BLAST page, select “nucleotide blast” (because we have nucleotide data), click the box for “others” to get you out of the human genome, enter the sequence in the search box, and click the “BLAST” button.  Any significant matches should be returned from the database within a few seconds.

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The Vertebrate Bias

The above pie chart shows the relative proportions of described species in various groups of organisms.  As we can see, most species are invertebrate animals.  Things like snails, flatworms, spiders, sponges, and insects.

Now compare that slice of pie to the proportion of GenBank sequences that represent invertebrates:

Yes, that thin blue wedge is all we’ve got.  While most mammal species have had at least a gene or two sequenced, the vast majority of non-vertebrate species have yet to meet a pipettor.   Entire families of insects haven’t received even a cursory genetic study.

Of course, we make great progress with the efficiency of focusing our efforts on a small number of model organisms.  But surely there’s an opportunity cost of putting all our eggs in the mammal basket.  What about the rest of life?

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