The MitoWheel was updated on February 10th, 2008. New features:
- You have already discovered for sure that the MitoWheel is able to show multiple results from any query. You get such multiple results if you type something like “tRNA” or “AGCTA”. You can then walk through
the results by clicking the red arrow in the search field, or simply pressing ENTER over and over. With the MitoWheel 1.1, we are going one level higher: you can now see several lists of results at the same time. As you might guess from the title of this blog, the different groups of matches are distinguished by color. For example, you can try “complex I, complex III, complex IV, complex V” (as a matter of fact, “c1, c3, c4, c5” works as well). You will get all the mitochondrially encoded subunits of these protein complexes, each complex in another color. To find out what each color stands for, take a look at the lower left corner. The only rule to make multiple searches is: separate the terms with commas. - If your search returns a region that is longer than 30 nucleotides, it will now be shown as an arc.
Tipps:
- Do you want to see, why the two strands of the mitochondrial DNA are called “heavy” and “light”? Type “CCC, GGG” and press ENTER. Cytosine has a molecular weight of 111.10 g/mol, while guanine 150.13 g/mol. The strand with more guanines is, therefore, heavier than the one with mainly cytosines. (Please note that most genes on the mitochondrial genome are physically located on the heavy strand. If it looks the other way around, it is because gene sequences are always given as the complementary strand that corresponds to the mRNA that is transcribed from the gene.)
- If you really want a lot of colors, try this: “TTTT, AAAA, CCCC, GGGG”. Then this: “I love mtDNA, TTTT, AAAA, CCCC, GGGG”, and this: “I love mtDNA, and the MitoWheel too, TTTT, AAAA, CCCC, GGGG”. (Well, you can skip the nonsense, it will be ignored anyway. But keep the extra commas to shift the color scheme.) If you make some search that turns the MitoWheel into a colorful piece of art, send me the text of the query and the title of your mito-painting. We could make a gallery…
MitoWheel 