Team Triumvirate
On the Conservation of Critical Regions
Team Members:Mingze Shi, Anthony Jeon, Howard Lu (Bellevue HS, Bellevue, WA)
Year: 2025-26 Coding Gene.us Challenge
Abstract
We take around 10 mammals and examine a housekeeping gene within them or a gene with well-known 3D structures. We use MUSCLE alignment to check the highest-conserved regions and if those regions correspond to well-known functions, such as binding sites, as they theoretically should. We can take analysis even further by seeing if the structure qualities of these proteins maintain the same even when the primary structure has differed much more. If we have completed the previous with time to spare, we can take a common immune gene from those 10 mammals and compare their evolutionary amino acid change rate to those of the housekeeping gene and see if immune system genes evolve "faster." We may need to construct an evolutionary tree for this.
